Long White Cloud
151 Hackney Rd
Shoreditch
E2 8JL
020 7033 4642
longwhitecloud-hoxton.tumblr.com
by Homefries Bogart
"Long White Cloud"... we strolled en masse towards Hackney Road, led by Matthias, a friend with a murky culinary history. I hadn't done my research on this but all I could put together was that as 'long black' is a coffee, perhaps 'long white' was a coffee, and cloud is a cloud. He mentioned it was a place run by Australians, but not to worry about that, "they do Monmouth Coffee… it's fine". His tone was in jest, but you never really know.
Five of us entered the long, narrow, white room, which looked as much like a cloud as all other long white rooms do, which is exactly the same but with angles and a floor. We sat at the back of the café, at a sort of ‘in-the-family’ table next to an upright piano. It was a good choice, as inevitably with these things, people caught wind of our jaunt and more came.
Matthias, with irrational ingenuity, had clocked the last bit of banana bread, and had it sent toasted with butter to the table, as a sort of breakfast amuse bouche. It would trump what was to follow.
Accompanying my double espresso with hot water, I had ordered the French toast with bacon, bananas and agave syrup, which, in my head, I had seconds ago read as, 'French toast with crispy bacon and maple syrup'. Its amazing how much the brain assumes when reading. But the French toast was not good. Breakfast goers must surely agree that anything other than crispy bacon, golden, shiny, oily, fluffy, eggy bread and sweet maple syrup is a complete no-no. And it was the EXACT opposite. I’m not even going in to what Agave syrup is because I don’t care.
Apart from myself and Oly, a great, foul mouthed Exeter based baker and food blogger (he ordered beans and cheese on toast ), everyone else ordered the veggie breakfast.
This was an extravagant mass of nicely roasted vegetables, bulbous slabs of grilled haloumi, piled on top of a huge bit of toasted ciabatta, with a fried egg somewhere in between and their version of baked beans on the side. Definitely LWC’s tour de force.
I had obviously missed the memo. Perhaps it has been lost on a white sheet of paper in this long cloud of a café. Overall though, there was madness in the cloud. No wait, method in the cloudness, err white, white...
3 comments:
"Land of the long white cloud" is another name for New Zealand. Could have been called Long Black (and made more sense), but I guess that ain't too much of an appealing name for breakfast.
Wake up Homefries Bogart. This is lazy blogging to tell us (even if quoting someone else and then not correcting) that it is "run by Australians".
It's not hard to ask why a place is called what it is or where the owners are from. Either would have made you look less foolish.
You just got served bogart. Served piss poor french toast. Lol. :'(
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