Paternoster Chop House, The City

Paternoster Chop House
1 Warwick Court
Paternoster Square
The City
EC4M 7DX
020 7029 9400
www.paternosterchophouse.co.uk

by Anne O'Raisin

Now I like a place with an idiosyncratic breakfast menu: and surprisingly for a place nestling in the shadow of St Paul’s, the Paternoster Chop House has a decidedly eclectic mix. Alongside the usual egg dishes, there are home-made crumpets with fresh honeycomb. A pile of toast comes with 'foraged jam'. I asked what fruit they had managed to gather by hand at this rather desolate time of year: it turned out to be crab apples. There was also some presumably un-foraged orange marmalade.

I'm a strictly sweet-food-for-breakfast kind of girl, so while my friend merrily ordered poached eggs, bacon and hash browns, I dithered over the "lighter fare". Fruit salad didn't sound nearly exciting enough. Poached berries and yoghurt was a tad healthy. Perhaps a signature crumpet?

Somehow the restaurant staff seemed to know what I really wanted without me asking - and without it even featuring on the menu. Now that's what I call service.

Unprompted, I was brought a tower of mini pancakes – a cross between drop scones and American silver dollars – studded with dried fruit and drizzled with poached berries in a vanilla syrup. It was delicious, although I asked for a splodge of Greek yoghurt on the side, just to be really reckless. If there had been an extra jug of syrup I wouldn’t have turned it away.

My friend's eggs came in a deep dish, the potatoes more of a hash than a hash brown and mixed with what looked like cabbage and possibly foraged herbs. There were two shards of properly crispy bacon on top, which made her happy.

Even the coffee was good - I tried regular and decaff, just to make sure.

As for the secret pancakes, I've been reliably informed that they'll be on the menu shortly so you won't have to rely on mind-reading staff to get hold of them.

Op-Egg: an attempt to exhaust a breakfast

(Tentative d'Épuisement d'un Petit-Déj)
by Georges Berecfast

Breakfast is a matter of proportion.

Any proportion can be expressed and analysed mathematically.

Take the four basic breakfast ingredients: egg, bacon, tomato¹, sausage.

The first thing to notice is that they can be eaten in various combinations. The taste of each ingredient is enhanced by combination with another. This is one of the chief pleasures of breakfast. Some people prefer the taste of sausage with egg; others, bacon with tomato. Fewer will eat sausage with tomato, and almost none, tomato with egg or sausage with bacon. This can be expressed thus:

Interesting results can be gained from converting this into a Venn diagram showing the most popular combinations, which expresses a fascinating and pleasing circularity accounting, perhaps, for the continuing popularity of the four basic ingredients (please ignore the central shaded area on the diagram below, which we shall come back to later).

Each combination can be called a ‘fork’. While it is difficult to fit more than two ingredients on a ‘fork’, it is possible to vary the proportions of the ingredients as below.

While its exact permutations are endless, the possible combinations on the ‘fork’  are also to some extent dictated by the proportions of each ingredient available on the entire breakfast plate. The ideal combination of sausage/bacon/egg/tomato remains controversial. The ideal breakfast plate (I am using current ‘Wolseley Standard’ proportions for the sake of argument) can be expressed in the form of a pie chart.

(It is not recommended that you eat pies for breakfast, even if they are made from breakfast ingredients).

The ‘fork’, though informative and graphically pleasing, can only describe a single instance of the ingredients on the fork of one individual breakfaster. If you were to map a whole breakfast room or table in, say, a hotel, at home, or in a greasy spoon, it is necessary to change the instrument of analysis. The more sophisticated scatter graph (below) can show the ‘fork’ combinations of a number of breakfasters simultaneously. We can also use it to show the ‘forks’ of a number of individual breakfasters during the course of a breakfast, where * = Malcolm Eggs, + = Seggolene Royal, and § = Georges Berecfast. 

If we look more closely at the scatter graph above, we notice that the vertical axis is vegetarian (eggs, tomatoes), and the horizontal axis is meat (sausages, bacon): another pleasing evidence of the natural balance of standard breakfast ingredients.

Toast: the Missing Factor.

I haven’t so for included toast as a factor as it is a neutral, and can be combined with any one of the other ingredients, or with several at a time. Unlike the ‘fork’, the form of toast (unless it is very soggy) can support more than two ingredients, taking taste combinations to a new level, the logical conclusion of which is the ‘breakfast bap’.

If toast is to be included on either the Venn diagram or scattergraph, we would have to place it centrally and assume the possibility of its presence in any possible ‘fork’ . You will see this, expressed as the shaded area on my Venn and scatter graphs above. 

Tea or Coffee - the Continental/Analytic divide?

This question has been regarded as philosophically dead for some time. If you like Wittgenstein, drink tea: if you like Sartre, drink coffee.

A Word on Beans.

Some would criticise me for not including beans in my analysis. This is not a mistake. Beans are a problematic ingredient incompatible with the idea of the ‘fork’, unless the ’fork’ is used to spear a single or small number of beans, or alternatively used to scoop them up like a spoon. Either technique makes the combination of beans with other ingredients on the same ‘fork’ almost impossible, though this has been disputed in controversial research conducted recently by Malcolm Eggs. 

Also, I don’t like beans. 

These calculations were worked out on a napkin during breakfasts at Le Bal Cafe, and Le Petit Cardinal, Paris.

¹ Tomato, for the purposes of our argument, stands for ‘tomato or mushrooms (but not beans: see ‘A word on beans’)’ ie the vegetable ingredient of the breakfast.

Lucky 7, Westbourne Green

Lucky 7

127 Westbourne Park Road
Westbourne Green
W2 5QL
0207 727 6771
www.lucky7london.co.uk

by Bee Loobury

After ranting to anyone in earshot on the subject of blueberry pancakes, in particular the lack of authentic blueberry pancakes (by that I mean what I know from my childhood in the Pacific northwest of America) in London, I have happily been appeased. All can rest easy now, or at least in peace and quiet.

Growing up in Seattle, the best part of the weekend was the Saturday breakfast outing to the Pancake Corral. Here I will fess up that in part my adoration of the blueberry pancake might stem from the co-mingling of delicious food with AN ENTIRE ROOM DEVOTED SOLELY TO AN INDOOR CAROUSEL, the magic of which never failed to astonish and delight my 3, 4 and 5 year old selves. Nonetheless, the pancakes held their own.

As way of a brief bit of background, that part of the United States is blueberry country. Blueberries are, or at least were, an important cash crop and culturally significant. There were blueberry fairs and in the late summer/early fall we would go blueberry picking: pail in hand. I remember the excitement at being told it would soon be blueberry season.

Granted, the patina of time may have rosied (or rather blued) up my relationship to the berry but that doesn’t detract from the fact of what comprises a proper blueberry pancake. Well a proper, and delectable, blueberry pancake is on offer at Lucky 7. Unlike at other Diner(s) that shall here remain nameless, a blueberry pancake is not a pancake topped with blueberry compote my friends.

As it should be, at Lucky 7 the whole blueberries are mixed into the pancake batter so that when they hit the griddle those nearest to the heat explode in gorgeous hot blueberry juice. These cakes are packed to the rafters with luscious little berries in various states of exploded succulence. My mouth literally watered as the cheeky (very American-like) waitress settled the white oval plate before me. Nestled in a splayed stack were 4 hot roundels of loveliness; perfectly sized - just smaller than a CD, and dusted with a light sprinkle of powdered sugar. Needless to say the syrup on offer is at its mapely best and the strips of bacon crispy (also something I’ve found to be more American than British).

On this note there is the issue of size, or actually thickness, that I can’t fail to mention. Here I must set the record straight. What most Brits have come to regard as a pancake, in reality is a crepe. I’m sorry to be the one to have to write this, especially seeing as the crepe is, well, yes, it’s French, and I know how you all feel about the French. But a pancake has depth, look at the word: pan-cake. It is a cake made in a pan. It should not be comparable to a thin sheet of paper; it should not be practically see through – that is a crepe.

My Lucky 7 pancakes were a bit on the thin side in relation to American standards, but in all truth I think this enhanced and showcased the blueberries to their advantage. They were still pudgy little cakes, thick enough to resist a fork but light as air in the eating.

The place is a stunning homage to the American diner in its many incarnations, from ‘40’s burger joint all the way to retro-hipster irony. The extensive menu is basically a treatise in temptation, including cocktails - a very inauthentic yet welcome addition to the diner repertoire. My feeling is as long as Lucky 7 continues to serve up the most delectable blueberry pancakes this side of the Atlantic, whatever else they do is alright by me. Thank you berry, berry much Lucky 7.