Café 1001, Spitalfields

Café 1001

91 Brick Lane

Spitalfields

E1 6QL (on corner of Dray Walk)

by Marge E. Reen

Breakfast ordered: Full English

Cost: £6

Time: 9 am Sunday morning.

Weather conditions: Hot and humid.

Location: Bench in alley off Brick Lane leading towards Rough Trade East. In the evenings Café 1001 is always heaving with drunk people eating burgers and fried chicken from the outdoor grill but at this hour it was sleepily quiet, too early for the hipster hordes to have surfaced. 

Service: Charmless. 

Forensic analysis

Exhibit A (sausage): Looked like a pallid penis in a ripped condom. Barely browned, microwaved, dubious pink colour. When I complained the manager insisted it was ‘a very nice Cumberland sausage’ despite all visual and gustatory evidence to the contrary.

Exhibit B (eggs):  Bone dry, leathery and not scrambled, which was what I had asked for, although the waitress/cook insisted I hadn’t.

Exhibit C (tomato): Hard, unforgiving and had only glimpsed a frying pan.

Exhibit D (coffee): Piss-weak.

Exhibit E (beans): The sauce had a mealy, furry quality, which suggested this item had been cooked a while before and reheated, possibly several times. 

Exhibit F (bacon): Overcooked but passable. About the only thing they didn’t manage to entirely screw up apart from...

Exhibit G (mushrooms): Decent, but could not compensate for the fact that my stomach had been utterly turned by Exhibits A and B.

Exhibit H (white toast): I sent my breakfast back before I got a chance to taste this but I don’t imagine this café is capable of toasting bread properly.

Verdict: Guilty of serving badly-cooked, borderline inedible food. After a brief (and relatively restrained) confrontation with the manager I got a refund. I hope my case for the prosecution has persuaded you not to go to this café. One of the worst breakfasts I have ever attempted to eat. I did consider forcing myself to finish it as I was hungry but I feared I would get food poisoning from the sausage, or something worse. 

Wetherspoons, Leeds

Wetherspoons
North Concourse
Leeds City Station
Leeds
West Yorkshire
LS1 4DT
0113 247 1676
www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/home/pubs/wetherspoons-leeds

by Michel Houellebrecq

What, or maybe more precisely who, in the name of God is a ‘Wetherspoon’? Sure, the website blathers on with some cheerily happy-clappy explanation, but I’m not convinced. If he (sorry) is a bloke, rather than a piece of undecidable cutlery, then I’d like to imagine he’s a pretty decent, salt-of-the-earth kind of (Northern) bloke, fresh back from a day’s honest graft to get in a couple o’t’ales for t’lads. It’s more likely, however, that he’s currently reclining on an inflatable lilo, sipping umbrella’d Pina Coladas as a fleet of nymphets (sorry, again) pamper his tootsies and buff his W-monogrammed belt-buckle.

Whoever he is, if the Leeds examples of his offerings are anything to go by, he’s onto a winner and his brand has turned things around, casting off images of sticky-carpeted hovels filled exclusively with the disturbed, the aggressive and the lonely. I was on a fleeting visit to Yorkshire and, whereas five years ago I would’ve pretended I’d gone to the infinitely classier (or slightly less shameful) All-Bar-One instead, I’m proud to publicly state that the only licensed hospitality I received during my time in the UK’s third-biggest city was from J.D. Wetherspoon Esq. Yes, you heard correctly.

I’d been impressed by the Thursday nite vibe of the Beckett’s Bank Branch. We’d wandered in there half by mistake: we were tired and hotelling in the vicinity, your Honour. I had to do a double take. This wasn’t the Wetherspoons of old. Where were the broken chairs? The shattered glass? The muscly dogs? The eight-man brawls? They’d been replaced by families, cross-cultural groups drinking coffee and having intelligent-looking debates, craft beer, real ales and fancy ciders. No-one was being beaten up, especially not me. We were so impressed, in fact, that we made a date for an early breakfast the following morning at the Station branch (this one didn’t open early enough); the newly-launched menu looked promising.

I wouldn’t normally dream of eating, or drinking (or maybe even breathing) in most British train stations, but if you put the depressing thought of the guy on the fruit machines gambling hard at 7.30am on a Friday out of mind, it was a joy. Cheap, decent, tasty, well-cooked, I might even dare ‘hearty’ fodder: what’s not to like? £4.60 for a ginormous ‘large’ cooked breakfast, £3.90 for a much more sensible ‘traditional’ version of the same. Everything you’d want was present and correct; sausages had substance, toast had poppy seeds (POPPY SEEDS!) and it was just the right side of greasy. Yeah, so the mushrooms might’ve been slightly on the soggy side, and they insisted on giving us each half a grilled tomato (who the hell actually eats them?), but I’m splitting hairs. They even have a selection of porridge and fresh fruit with ‘Greek-style’ honey. All the calories are clearly displayed for the post-5/2 generation. Coffee was good (hot, strong) and you get free refills until deep in the afternoon. Under £11 for breakfast for two. It’s a bleedin’ public service. Criticising this would be like slagging off a sunny day, although, rest assured, I’ve been known to do that. Whether Herr Wetherspoon is an honest sod, or a smily spiv, it matters not. His gaff is worth a (re)visit.