Aaron House
The Promenade
Port St Mary
Isle of Man IM9 5DE
+44 (0)1624 835702
www.aaronhouse.co.uk
by Kiwi Herman
For the London-centric of you, a quick geography lesson... the Isle of Man is nowhere near the Isle of Bestival. You’ll find it smack bang in the middle of the Irish Sea (left at Liverpool or right at Belfast). And the Manx folk? They’re white, 4-horned-sheep-eating, tailless-cat-owning, tax-avoiding, Martin Clunes-haters. Oh, and their 3-leg-logo looks somewhat like a Swastika.
But they sure know how to smoke a kipper.
I found myself in the Wild West of the windy Isle last week – alone in the honeymoon suite of a seaside guesthouse advertising an organic breakfast with a ‘Victoriana ethos’.
Welcome to the living museum that is Aaron House – all decor is period. Patterned wallpaper? Check. Bone china tea sets? Check. Chequered black and white floor? Cheque. What’s more, the relentlessly jolly proprietors Reggie & Kath dress in Victorian attire at all times. It’s Upstairs Downstairs fetishism by day and lordknowswhat by night.
Kath knows her place – pummelling away her homemade breads. I’m not entirely convinced of the Victorian historical authenticity of a full fry-up inclusive of Buck Rarebit and kippers, but she stews her own fruit and makes her own jam… what a woman! (What is it well-known philosopher/ feminist Jerry Hall said about being a maid in the living room, cook in the kitchen and…’?).
Well, if the Victorians were Opium-smoking sex-mad hippies, then there were only 2 things missing from my dish. Or were they? The lure of the grub and Kath’s mumsy, large apron-ed breasts proved addictive. I never get up at 7am, but managed 5 days in a row. Plus, I wonder if you ding that little bell with a certain rhythm you could get more than just a fruit tart.
Oh, and did I mention Reg loves showing visitors his telescope? The puns write themselves.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Portorais Hotel, Palermo, Sicily
Portorais Hotel
Via Piraineto, 125
Palermo, 90044
Sicily
Italy
+39 091 8693481
www.hotelportorais.com
by Blake Pudding
We were somewhere around Corleone on the edge of the mountains when the Prosecco began to take hold. I had been commissioned by Oligarch magazine (incorporating Toff Monthly) to write an article on a classic car rally. Girls, Alfa Romeos and louche antics, the piece would practically write itself and I would get a free holiday. It was not to be. When the rally organisers found out about my intentions they threatened to run over my legs with a 1972 Cadillac Eldorado. I was skint and commissionless in Sicily so I patched a call through to Malcolm Eggs to ask whether he would take a special breakfast dispatch. He said yes and generously agreed to pay my expenses out of the LRB budget. I was back in the game but rapidly running out of words without having touched on what I had for breakfast.
We had eaten that morning at the Hotel Portorais. Everyone looked a little peaky after the night before though not as peaky as the hotel itself with its air of faded grandeur and thwarted ambition. The staff’s uniforms looked like something from an am dram production of HMS Pinafore. They laid on a top breakfast though. Excellent coffee of course - it is very hard to get bad coffee in Sicily - but also cakes, tarts, croissants, yoghurt and best of all a kind of flat calzone thing stuffed with ham and cheese. Not knowing when, where or with whom I would be having lunch, I made a bit of a pig of myself. I need not have worried, as after getting slightly lost, we ran into the rest of the group just outside Monreale. The Cadillac was groaning with food and wine. I necked the best part of a bottle of Prosecco, ate more pizza and then shouted “follow me to Corleone, I know the way,” though of course I didn’t and was just drunk and showing off.
Via Piraineto, 125
Palermo, 90044
Sicily
Italy
+39 091 8693481
www.hotelportorais.com
by Blake Pudding
We were somewhere around Corleone on the edge of the mountains when the Prosecco began to take hold. I had been commissioned by Oligarch magazine (incorporating Toff Monthly) to write an article on a classic car rally. Girls, Alfa Romeos and louche antics, the piece would practically write itself and I would get a free holiday. It was not to be. When the rally organisers found out about my intentions they threatened to run over my legs with a 1972 Cadillac Eldorado. I was skint and commissionless in Sicily so I patched a call through to Malcolm Eggs to ask whether he would take a special breakfast dispatch. He said yes and generously agreed to pay my expenses out of the LRB budget. I was back in the game but rapidly running out of words without having touched on what I had for breakfast.
We had eaten that morning at the Hotel Portorais. Everyone looked a little peaky after the night before though not as peaky as the hotel itself with its air of faded grandeur and thwarted ambition. The staff’s uniforms looked like something from an am dram production of HMS Pinafore. They laid on a top breakfast though. Excellent coffee of course - it is very hard to get bad coffee in Sicily - but also cakes, tarts, croissants, yoghurt and best of all a kind of flat calzone thing stuffed with ham and cheese. Not knowing when, where or with whom I would be having lunch, I made a bit of a pig of myself. I need not have worried, as after getting slightly lost, we ran into the rest of the group just outside Monreale. The Cadillac was groaning with food and wine. I necked the best part of a bottle of Prosecco, ate more pizza and then shouted “follow me to Corleone, I know the way,” though of course I didn’t and was just drunk and showing off.
Friday, May 08, 2009
Wild Cherry, Bethnal Green
Wild Cherry
241 Globe Rd
Bethnal Green
E2 0JD
020 8980 6678
www.wildcherrycafe.com
by Joyce Carol Oats
I am meant to be in Chicago this Bank Holiday weekend, eating spongey pancakes drowned in sticky brown syrup that tastes of twenty different E-numbers, accompanied by my nice ex-boyfriend and the faint hope that Ira Glass might turn up in the diner. But alas! A twist of fate has left me in Bethnal Green - usually my favourite place on the planet, but not when I'm meant to be in Chicago. To simulate the experience I crave, I decide to breakfast at Wild Cherry: they do a passable American-style pancake, albeit with a maple syrup that doesn't require quotation marks.
Wild Cherry is a not-for-profit operation, run by the London Buddhist Centre, which is next door. And maybe this is why the service is so appalling. The staff members get orders wrong, fail to bring food altogether, or sometimes just blink and smile beatifically. It's the kind of behaviour that would make me very short-tempered anywhere else, but here it makes me sigh affectionately and think, 'Oh, you guys' in a way not dissimilar to how I regard my untrainable but lovable border collie.
The breakfast menu - only served on Saturdays – has two things worth eating. There are pancakes with fruit, maple syrup and mascarpone (and variations thereof), or a vegetarian full English affair which includes by far the best scrambled eggs I've ever had the pleasure of interacting with: fluffy and not greasy and decorated with chopped fresh chives. I assume they are the product of zen hens. There is also some kind of muesli, but I have never seen anyone order it (what kind of person orders muesli in a restaurant?) and a choice of wraps that look less than delightful.
The garden outside is non-smoking, which pleases me, since I am an asthmatic square. When the pancakes arrive they are a little thinner than usual, like someone forgot to add the leavening agent because he was thinking about more spiritual things. But they are still whole wheat-y and delicious, topped what must be more than £6.25 worth of chopped seasonal fresh fruit alone, a generous blob of thick mascarpone, and a glistening pool of syrup that was once actually part of a tree. I am sad that the café upgraded its old drip coffee maker (free refills) to an espresso machine (non free refills, and tastes burnt). But munching my way through the pancakes and reading an interesting essay on Beckett in the New York Review of Books, I think: OK, no Ira Glass, or E-numbers, or ex-boyfriend. But almost.
241 Globe Rd
Bethnal Green
E2 0JD
020 8980 6678
www.wildcherrycafe.com
by Joyce Carol Oats
I am meant to be in Chicago this Bank Holiday weekend, eating spongey pancakes drowned in sticky brown syrup that tastes of twenty different E-numbers, accompanied by my nice ex-boyfriend and the faint hope that Ira Glass might turn up in the diner. But alas! A twist of fate has left me in Bethnal Green - usually my favourite place on the planet, but not when I'm meant to be in Chicago. To simulate the experience I crave, I decide to breakfast at Wild Cherry: they do a passable American-style pancake, albeit with a maple syrup that doesn't require quotation marks.
Wild Cherry is a not-for-profit operation, run by the London Buddhist Centre, which is next door. And maybe this is why the service is so appalling. The staff members get orders wrong, fail to bring food altogether, or sometimes just blink and smile beatifically. It's the kind of behaviour that would make me very short-tempered anywhere else, but here it makes me sigh affectionately and think, 'Oh, you guys' in a way not dissimilar to how I regard my untrainable but lovable border collie.
The breakfast menu - only served on Saturdays – has two things worth eating. There are pancakes with fruit, maple syrup and mascarpone (and variations thereof), or a vegetarian full English affair which includes by far the best scrambled eggs I've ever had the pleasure of interacting with: fluffy and not greasy and decorated with chopped fresh chives. I assume they are the product of zen hens. There is also some kind of muesli, but I have never seen anyone order it (what kind of person orders muesli in a restaurant?) and a choice of wraps that look less than delightful.
The garden outside is non-smoking, which pleases me, since I am an asthmatic square. When the pancakes arrive they are a little thinner than usual, like someone forgot to add the leavening agent because he was thinking about more spiritual things. But they are still whole wheat-y and delicious, topped what must be more than £6.25 worth of chopped seasonal fresh fruit alone, a generous blob of thick mascarpone, and a glistening pool of syrup that was once actually part of a tree. I am sad that the café upgraded its old drip coffee maker (free refills) to an espresso machine (non free refills, and tastes burnt). But munching my way through the pancakes and reading an interesting essay on Beckett in the New York Review of Books, I think: OK, no Ira Glass, or E-numbers, or ex-boyfriend. But almost.
Friday, May 01, 2009
Breakfasts and Beds: Escape, Llandudno
Escape Boutique B&B
48 Church Walks
Landudno
LL30 2HL
01492 877 776
www.escapebandb.co.uk
by Cher E. Jamm
I don't know about you, but when I go away to a bed & breakfast, I'm usually disproportionately excited about the prospect of breakfast the next morning. I don't care for soft furnishings, and I certainly don't give two hoots about where we dine on the day of arrival, but I'll drool and fantasise and lose sleep over the morning to come. And I'm usually disappointed and left fuming and tearful at the piddly excuse of what lay before my eyes.
At the Escape Boutique B&B, from the moment we swanned into the ornate dining room, with its parquet floors, high ceilings and fancy table settings, I got the feeling that past experiences could potentially wash away. Linen napkins and neat little menus greeted us, as did the extraordinarily gorgeous, smiling waitress who would not look out of place in a Californian beauty contest. I had to ask Mr Jamm to retrieve his jaw from the floor.
And with that, a flurry of ordering took place. Freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and a cafetiere of Columbia's finest arrived with a flourish. Deliciously fresh fruit salad with natural yoghurt served in classy tumblers were gobbled up within seconds. A glance at the Sunday papers and then it was then time for the Grand Poobah, the real test of metal. The Escape was about to show its true colours.
And what colours they were. Two neat, finely fried eggs lay in the middle of this handsome plate, surrounded by the holy hexagon of all that makes a Full English. Two sausages of rare and fine pedigree (and still sizzling!); crisp bacon that is a reminder to all of why we should only eat animals that have led happy lives; a grilled field mushroom that could have doubled as a parasol; a grilled tomato that was actually cooked (I can't recall the last time that happened); a few spoonfuls of beans that didn't swamp the plate and finally, the piece de resistance: black pudding as I never knew or liked before. It was about the shape and size of a cocktail sausage and perfectly cooked on the outside, and full of bloody, oatey goodness on the inside.
I implore you all to go. Go to Llandudno, that rusty and charming old seaside resort. Go stay at the Escape B&B with it's fine soft furnishings and lovely staff. Go and find salvation in a breakfast fit for gods. And then go tell all your friends to do the same.
48 Church Walks
Landudno
LL30 2HL
01492 877 776
www.escapebandb.co.uk
by Cher E. Jamm
I don't know about you, but when I go away to a bed & breakfast, I'm usually disproportionately excited about the prospect of breakfast the next morning. I don't care for soft furnishings, and I certainly don't give two hoots about where we dine on the day of arrival, but I'll drool and fantasise and lose sleep over the morning to come. And I'm usually disappointed and left fuming and tearful at the piddly excuse of what lay before my eyes.
At the Escape Boutique B&B, from the moment we swanned into the ornate dining room, with its parquet floors, high ceilings and fancy table settings, I got the feeling that past experiences could potentially wash away. Linen napkins and neat little menus greeted us, as did the extraordinarily gorgeous, smiling waitress who would not look out of place in a Californian beauty contest. I had to ask Mr Jamm to retrieve his jaw from the floor.
And with that, a flurry of ordering took place. Freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and a cafetiere of Columbia's finest arrived with a flourish. Deliciously fresh fruit salad with natural yoghurt served in classy tumblers were gobbled up within seconds. A glance at the Sunday papers and then it was then time for the Grand Poobah, the real test of metal. The Escape was about to show its true colours.
And what colours they were. Two neat, finely fried eggs lay in the middle of this handsome plate, surrounded by the holy hexagon of all that makes a Full English. Two sausages of rare and fine pedigree (and still sizzling!); crisp bacon that is a reminder to all of why we should only eat animals that have led happy lives; a grilled field mushroom that could have doubled as a parasol; a grilled tomato that was actually cooked (I can't recall the last time that happened); a few spoonfuls of beans that didn't swamp the plate and finally, the piece de resistance: black pudding as I never knew or liked before. It was about the shape and size of a cocktail sausage and perfectly cooked on the outside, and full of bloody, oatey goodness on the inside.
I implore you all to go. Go to Llandudno, that rusty and charming old seaside resort. Go stay at the Escape B&B with it's fine soft furnishings and lovely staff. Go and find salvation in a breakfast fit for gods. And then go tell all your friends to do the same.
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