Global Breakfast Radio

Global Breakfast Radio is a month old today. You may have spotted it when I discreetly added a link to the sidebar, but if for some reason that passed you by, it's here.

What the hell am I talking about? Global Breakfast Radio is an internet radio station made out of other radio stations, always broadcasting from wherever it's breakfast-time right now. It's a collaboration between me and the sound artist Daniel Jones, and maybe isn't really that much about breakfast at all.

Press play on the website and you'll constantly follow the sunrise, dropping in on one radio station after another for ten minutes at a time before randomly moving on to the next. You might hear college radio from Canterbury, news discussion from Lagos, rock & roll radio from Anchorage, crackly Spanish music from Montevideo, and so on, all the way around the planet.

Since Global Breakfast Radio launched we've been surprised by how many places people are listening from. It's done really well in the UK and US but is also pretty big in Japan and Russia. Listeners from 135 countries have tuned in, including in the US Virgin Islands, Myanmar, Togo, and Zimbabwe. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the sunrise images in the background, and the local weather data pulled from networked weather stations across the globe. For the former we had to filter over 10,000 creative commons-licensed sunrise images sourced from Flickr. It was interesting and gruelling: some people will tag anything with the word ‘sunrise’.

For more in-depth writing about the project, I recommend this brilliant piece at the Guardian TV & Radio blog, and these interviews at Wired UK and The Line of Best Fit.

And if you like your background material meta then there's some breakfast radio on the subject of breakfast radio that went out a couple of weeks ago on BBC Radio 4’s Sunday morning show, Broadcasting House.

Seb Emina
4 June 2014

Café Margaux, New York, USA

Café Margaux
Marlton Hotel
5 West 8th Street
New York
NY 10011
USA
marltonhotel.com/#dining

by Séggolène Royal

New Yorkers are a demanding lot.

I say this with affection, because as a native New Yorker they are my lot. It’s a loud, dirty place with tiny living spaces and the potential for atrocious weather that still retains much of the grit Giuliani and Bloomberg tried so hard to scrub off. Given this, New Yorkers feel that they are entitled to receive whatever they want, whenever they want, to make up for the fact that they are tethered to the “island that is their lives’ predicament,” as Maeve Brennan once put it. Nowhere is this entitlement more in effect than in a restaurant.

I feel bad for wait staff in New York. Not only are they probably the next Sir John Barrymore and Vanessa Redgrave waiting on me, but they have to wait on all those demanding New Yorkers, who demand to know if there is gluten, dairy, raw eggs, nuts, or whatever the latest bad thing is in what they want to order. And they want this on the side and they want to hold that and so on and so forth. They’ll tip you well for it, though. Visiting from Paris I remember with a jolt when I get the bill that my meal or drinks costs 20-30% more than I thought it would because of the generous apologetic tip at the end. And if you’ve been an easy table, if you haven’t asked for the sun (hold the moon) on your plate, you’re still a scheister if you don’t pony up.

As a native New Yorker I occasionally like to take this privilege for a ride. This morning at Café Margaux at the Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village, I ordered oatmeal with almonds, cranberries, and pomegranate seeds. But I was concerned that the oatmeal wouldn’t be sweet enough - I usually like it with maple syrup. Hey, it’s New York, I thought. I can have maple syrup if I want it. So I asked the waiter if I could have a little on the side. He hesitated, but was duty-bound to give it to me, and said he would look for some in the kitchen.

When he brought the oatmeal, it came with what looked like honey on the side. “Is that honey on the side?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “Oh ok, then I don’t need the maple syrup,” I said, as he was about to pour me my coffee. “Oh!” he said, and stopped pouring the coffee. “No I did want more coffee please yes please,” I said, to get him pouring again, and he said “Yes, I just have to go tell the kitchen right away that you don’t need the maple syrup,” and fled. When he came back he finished pouring the coffee.

I dressed my oatmeal in honey and it was delicious, though the kitchen had been a bit stingy about the pomegranate seeds. Halfway through the meal, a little dish of maple syrup arrived, borne by a busboy, by which point I didn’t need it, but I poured a little in just to be nice.

Meanwhile there was the coffee. It was delicious, but the milk they brought with it was skim milk. Even though that’s what I grew up on, having been raised by New Yorkers, I have since gone off its tasteless watery whiteness. But I felt I had made enough of a fuss over the maple syrup, and so I accepted the skim milk as meekly as an out-of-towner.

Malcolm enjoyed his salmon but complained that his scrambled eggs were overdone. “That is standard scrambled,” I told him. “An American would react with horror and salmonella fear if they were served runny. But they’re entitled to their overdone eggs; it’s our responsibility to remember to ask for them the way we like them.”

There are some things, however, that a New Yorker should not be able to order. The menu included scrambled eggs with chicken, and this is one of them.

Pret a Manger, Euston

Pret a Manger
P1
Euston Piazza
Euston station
NW1 2DY
020 7932 5432
www.pret.com

by Haulin' Oats

What is it about the service in Pret a Manger? From where comes the unforced, invigorating, positive energy? The busier it gets, the happier they seem to get. There’s a spirited ‘all hands on deck’ atmosphere. I swear I can hear the white sails ripple and snap as this honest crew, this band of merry brothers and sisters navigate, undaunted and thrillingly alive, the storms of hungry office workers.

All of which is ironic because the guy who serves me is a real c**t.

No eye contact, not a flicker of evidence that he's interacting with a fellow human being. This is rude, it’s belligerent, it’s bad service – but it doesn't earn him the c-word moniker. It’s this that promotes him; the girl behind me is tall, blonde and pretty. He’s smiling at her, animated, he’s all small talk and charm. He shoves a coffee loosely in my direction without a glance. What a c**t.

He's a Pret exception. They exist. Of course they do.

As I sit down at my table that thing happens which we will never know or understand. I throw my coffee all over the floor.

One of the crew is there quickly. She’s trying to make me feel as if the spill is absolutely nothing to do with me. ‘It happens ten times a day, or more! I blame the cups. There’s something wrong with the cups...’

A former or off duty brother/shipmate walks in (you can tell by the warm camaraderie of their greeting). They talk about her being pregnant. Then she's down on the floor, pregnant and vital clearing up my coffee. She brings me a replacement, offers to fetch sugar. The spirit of Pret Service fills the sails once more.

And now a sentence that would utterly horrify my teenage-self: what I wouldn't give to get the inside track on Pret’s hiring processes.

The little granola in a pot is pretty good. The granola has crunch and cluster (though there’s too little of it in proportion to the rest). The yoghurt is tangy and crisp. The compote has a good fruity zing. Overall the portion is small for breakfast, but then you’re paying a little less than a full blown regular cafe granola.

The indie idiot in me, the part that can't help but slightly go off a band if they get hugely successful, feels a little concerned about this gush of positivity for such a large chain. But you know what? Pret revolutionised grabbing a quick lunch for urban dwellers, and their service is a modern wonder, so well done them.

Green Room Cafe, Stoke Newington

Green Room Cafe
113 Stoke Newington Church St
Stoke Newington
N16 0UD

by S. Presso

A Church Street florist has grown to occupy the entire ground floor and garden of its shop front, and now calls itself the Green Room Cafe. The staff bring menus after you sit down but they are not particularly good at bringing anything to you, including menus. Once they arrive we can order cappuccinos, a vegetarian breakfast and a lentil stew.

The cappuccinos are virtually babyccinos. The food, although prompt to arrive, is accompanied by only forks. Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of fork-only eating when appropriate. But these dishes need more: the stew needs a knife as it comes with rice and salad which needs to be gathered (if I’m honest, it could do with a spoon too) and the vegetarian breakfast is in every way a knife-and-fork meal. We put in our requests for knives and we wait. When you have hot food in front of you and you can’t dig in, impatience mushrooms, so, ninety seconds later, I request knives again from the owner who promptly delivers them with apologies, followed moments later by more knives and eye-rolling from the other waitress.

Home-made baked beans are rare: these are good. My vegetarian sausage is dense and tasty and you can tell it’s home-made as it is shaped like a penis. The eggs were listed as fried. I ordered scrambled. They arrive poached. But poached well. The fried tomato is exactly that. The fried mushrooms are the borrower variety: tiny but delicious. The bubble and squeak is the disappointment. As a main constituent it needs to hold the dish together and work with everything on the fork but it is bland, mushy and unseasoned.

The lentil stew is not my dish but the mouthfuls I had were good if also a little under-seasoned. Obviously this is not a breakfast but I brandish it as evidence of a limited menu.

The bland interior contributes much to the lifeless atmosphere. The main attractions are repurposed sewing-machine tables and wall-mounted crates that serve as storage. Constantly under-served tables drive diners to approach the counter for their own menus and again to order. Most tables have someone twisted in their chair vying for attention.

The breakfast is turbulent if enjoyable and we are happy to leave. And appropriately, the process is long-winded. You pay at the till. A lycra-clad cyclist is skating the floorboards as we try to put jackets on inches away from a couple trying to eat. The breakfast comes to 20 pounds for two meals, cappuccinos and cookies. Not so bad. Admittedly the food was pretty good: one of the better vegetarian breakfasts in the area. Trouble is, the café feels immature. The owners are eager but some of their staff are letting them down. Small changes here could make a big winner.

Goody Goody Diner, St. Louis, USA

Goody Goody Diner

5900 Natural Bridge Ave.

St. Louis, Missouri 63120

www.goodygoodydiner.com

by Louie Slinger

It's a diner, in an urban, old and rather industrial neighborhood. Connolly's Goody Goody Diner began in a converted root beer stand in 1948, and Richard Connolly has never worked anywhere else. Breakfast all day, six days a week - there's lunch, but their reputation, still growing after all these years, is all about morning food.

The kids have discovered chicken and waffles, and Goody's version is exemplary, the chicken hot and fresh and greaseless, to dab with syrup or not as you eat the waffle underneath. But serious breakfast folks have hard choices, lots of them. Which of fourteen meat options? Which of twelve ways to have them cook your eggs? Pancakes – hotcakes, as the menu styles them – or waffles or French toast? Rice, grits or hash brown potatoes? Omelets? Skillets, a sort of mashup of different things? Or just a breakfast sandwich?

I frequently succumb, though, to the country fried steak – beef pounded, breaded and fried until brown, topped with a milky pan gravy, and some over-easy eggs and grits. Or else it's the Wilbur omelet, their take on a St. Louis tradition, the omelet filled with potatoes, onions, sweet green peppers and tomato, then topped with chili and shredded cheese. (By legend, good for hangovers, better at preventing them.) Or else there's the catfish and American-style biscuits.

Much of the food style is of the soul food/Southern kitchen tradition, but the crowd here is gloriously mixed: mechanics and ministers, tourists and students, police and politicians. Al Gore stopped by during one presidential campaign. Richard Connolly is pretty much always on hand. They do lots of takeaway, and there's often a line, but it's worth waiting for. Study the huge menu while you're waiting, watch the hard-working staff, who really earn their Sundays off, and make sure you take advantage of some first-rate eavesdropping.

Bluebelles, Portobello Rd

Bluebelles
320 Portobello Road
Kensal Town
W10 5RU
020 8968 4572

by Haulin' Oats

Oh no.

One of the most common and, perhaps, saddest of granola sins. An easily avoidable failure right at the final hurdle. My granola arrives in a glass.

The delights of achieving the perfect proportions of granola, yoghurt and compote according to whim have now been destroyed. The Pollock-esque creative freedom of sometimes mixing elements together in great swathes or perhaps making small, continuing adjustments - flicks and flourishes - is now dismantled. Even doing nothing at all, like Fonzy in the mirror, and eating the granola, yoghurt and compote separately, in the order you so desire, is no longer possible.

In a glass you’re operating in impossibly cramped conditions. Claustrophobia rises as you dig down to try and reach an element. Over mixing is inevitable. Your control has been destroyed.

Also, glasses tend to be smaller than bowls. With granola, especially, there’s nothing worse than being under-served.

It’s a tall glass. It's filled with yoghurt, berry compote and then a meagre sprinkling of sorry supermarket ‘basics’ looking granola on top. It reaches to half-way up the vessel, leaving me feeling hard done by in a, errr, glass half empty kind of way. It looks like an agoraphobic sundae. It’s the last thing a breakfast already struggling under a light-weight, frivolous image needs.

The granola has a supermarket basics taste. The compote is underwhelming and manages the ignominious trick of being not sweet enough and missing a fruity tartness too.

The yoghurt isn’t very nice.

My glass half empty of granola is finished almost as soon as I’ve embarked on my cramped spoon manoeuvring.

I do want to cry a little bit.

So much so, cake rescue needs to be undertaken. And, my, does the pear and almond polenta cake save souls. Moist, delicately sweet with a strong taste of pears complemented by a judicious amount of chocolate and whole hazelnuts on top. Much more like it.

Bluebelles does have a pleasing ambience. That cake was really, very good. The waitress gave me a pick of excellent speciality breads to take home for free because it was the end of the day (perhaps sensing my earlier disappointment?). However, the granola was obviously a careless afterthought thrown in to appease addicts, which is so often the case in London. It really is an opportunity missed though, because if you do get it right that granola addict is your friend for life. AND WE WILL MAKE YOU RICH. So, buck up, London cafes.

The Ace Hotel/Hoi Polloi, Shoreditch

The Ace Hotel/Hoi Polloi
100 Shoreditch High Street
Shoreditch
E1 6JQ
www.hoi-polloi.co.uk

by Haulin' Oats

The first thing you notice upon walking into the Ace Hotel is that there’s an awful lot of stuff for sale. Ace Hotel branded T-shirts, baseball caps and two-tone duffle coats are all available, though the staff are kitted out in these, so you’d have to be careful wearing them on site - someone might ask you to do something. Or sell them something,

There are brand new vintage bikes dotted around, replete with faux leather saddles, which you can buy. There’s vinyl tiling the front of the reception desk that you can buy (things like the Easy Rider soundtrack and Fleetwood Mac albums, of course). There’s an old school photo booth which maybe you can’t buy. The chairs at one table are mid century vintage, at the other Swedish minimal. One wall is exposed concrete, another opaque wired glass. The strategy seems to be; if it’s hipster, or kind of arty or sort of design - chuck it in. Perhaps the vision was to achieve a type of maximal, characterful ambience but it just feels confused, contrived and a bit crap.

My friend said it sounds like an East London theme park. He’s good at summing things up.

Unable to find a menu I’m pointed to a thin fanzine with Hoi Polloi printed on the front. It turns out that I’m actually in Hoi Polloi, an ‘English Modernist Brasserie’ from the people behind the cross-dressing and dining stalwart Bistrotheque. It drapes itself across the Ace Hotel reception meandering into a coffee shop area and subsequently through to a more dedicated restaurant.

My latte arrives warm and not extra hot as requested (perhaps satisfying a coffee Nazi responsible for its creation that "the flavour of the milk has remained unimpaired").

The granola has a home-baked feel, a lovely dark colour, but isn’t sweet enough. And in a rare granola switcherooni there are actually too many nuts. I know! But there are.

The compote is 3 strips of rhubarb, which has an incredible perfumed flavour balanced perfectly on the sweet-tart axis. However, its not compote-y (gooey) enough. You can’t divide the stalks with your spoon to get the desired proportions for your mouthful. And there’s not enough of it. The overall amount, is reasonable. Not generous, but enough.

I was really hoping for an Ace-hole in one for this granola experience. I thought the hype and big hotel success would help deliver it. However, mildly satisfied, a couple under par, I move on.

Cabmen's Shelter, Russell Square

The Shelter
Russell Square
Bloomsbury
WC1B 5DU
Open from 7am – 3pm

by Evelyn Waughffle

On the west side of Russell Square stands a small wooden construction which looks like a prim garden shed. A Bloomsbury garden shed would, I suppose, be necessarily smarter and more sophisticated than its suburban counterpart, sort of like its snooty distant cousin. This one, a very fine specimen indeed, has a neat black hat of a roof and walls painted a shade of racing-green normally reserved for billiard tables. My curiosity had long been piqued by this strayed piece of garden architecture which, for all its nattiness is still somewhat provincial, not so much out of place as it is out of time. Earlier this year I was thrilled to discover that it is not a shed at all. The structure is one of thirteen still standing in London, out of sixty-odd built between 1875 and 1914 by the Cabmen’s Shelter Fund. This was a fund set up by a gang of Victorian philanthropists who took pity on the men who drove hackney carriages at ungodly hours of the day and wondered, presumably, where on earth they would get their breakfasts. It is nice to think that the Victorians thought as highly of this meal as we do, and higher perhaps of cabmen. Not being a cabman I approached the shelter with some trepidation. There was an open hatch out from which blew pleasant frying smells and a door, ever so slightly ajar.

I felt like Lucy, who discovered Narnia inside a wardrobe, except that in my case Narnia was the size of a wardrobe. The shelter is both larger and smaller than you might imagine. One half houses a very well stocked kitchen, the other benches and a strange adjustable running board of a table. The eating-half is not quite as small as a matchbox, more like a decent sized bathtub. But eating your breakfast in a bathtub (with three sturdy workmen flanking you to the left and a refrigerator hemming you to the right) is not for the faint-hearted. Like Archimedes, I was suddenly keenly aware of the volume of irregular objects. Everything worked with a floating co-dependent gravity; we all had to be very careful not to upset the ketchup or the boiled eggs would fall out. Turning the pages of the Sun was a feat of marvellous collaboration.

The root of this extreme spatial curtailment is the adjustable table which loops above the benches and holds diners in place like a harness on a theme park ride. It was how I imagine eating breakfast in a lifeboat might feel; birdcage on your lap, bobbing up and down in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by rather grim strangers who you can’t quite be sure understood your request for them to ‘pass the salt’. Interestingly the ‘lifeboat’ approach to seating has been adopted (perhaps in homage) in the back of the Monmouth Coffee shop not far from here. It is as though they either don’t want you to eat at all, or for you not to be able to leave if you do.

The food. I opted for a sausage sandwich. But I could have been more imaginative as the size of the kitchen does not reflect the limits of the menu. If you want it, Terry can probably make it. The sandwich was piping hot, a tidy squelch of thick white bloomer (margarine, un-toasted) and a crush of sausages. It was a full sandwich, as if, in an unconscious echo of the shelter, the bread had been stuffed, packed, crammed. It was a rush-hour-platform of a sandwich; I was a little overwhelmed. I sipped my coffee and waited for the sandwich to cool, wondering how to tackle it. The coffee was of the milky, sugary, instant variety that I associate with youth hostels. It was lovely. The sausages were good; thick and pink, crisp and brown, but there were so many of them! The sauce to sausage ratio (there was a generous slathering of HB and tomato ketchup) was such that the thing started to lose its shape. The integrity of the structure crumbled entirely when not one but two sausage halves slipped from my grip, and out onto the plate; men overboard!

There is no cutlery in the cabmen’s shelter so I ate the escapees with my fingers which, while it may have been a little revolting to observe, was both necessary and satisfying. It also gave me the chance to effect an introduction to the three men I was breakfasting with. Our knees were practically touching but English breakfast sang-froid meant we had not shared anything but gruff nods and evasive grunts during the pantomime of sitting down without knocking anything over. There aren’t many situations as disarming as being temporarily incapacitated by a sausage sandwich. They saw me floundering, offered a stack of paper napkins and we all made friends. They were lift-repair men and gave me some very good advice about why you should never take lifts. I wondered if the shelter were smaller or larger than those famously claustrophobic spaces but kept it to myself. I will be going back. The food was good, the price excellent (£2.50 for vast s/w and coffee), and the surroundings, not to be missed.

Special Dispatch: Breakfast in Yangon

by Daw Aung San Mue Sli

Most shop-bought food in Myanmar is consumed sitting on tiny plastic stools of the sort you might find in a kindergarten. They come with both backs and no-backs, and in numerous colours though sun-bleached red and blue are favourites, usually with matching tiny tables. I have seen many of these stools stapled back together where a particularly heavy customer has flattened one. Such fixing is proudly described as doing it ‘Bamar-lo’, the Burmese way of getting around even the most arduous junta-imposed restrictions. These stools are not limited to teashops and rice shops, they can also be handily brought out to seat passengers sitting in the aisle of a bus. Myanmar's people may be small and stunted through years of malnutrition but their knees almost reach their ears when they sit on them too. They are quite small.

Not necessarily the most comfortable position in which to digest breakfast.

But dear reader, the breakfasts are worth it even if you have to eat them folded up. The greatest of all breakfast food in Yangon (and many other parts of the country) is mohinga. Your mohinga server unthreads a handful of fresh noodles from the clump of noodles in the display case, dumps them in a bowl, and spoons over them a grey-brown coloured fish broth out of a big tin tureen. It’s optional to add a boiled duck egg, or broken up bits of fried corn wafer, or fried gourd, or a few other fried items. This dish [there's a recipe at meemalee.com] is then brought to your plastic table where you can add a squeeze of lime, a pinch of fresh coriander from a little tin bowl, a spoonful of dried chilli.

Tin Tin Aye mohinga shop on the roadside in Yankin Township (and 4 other locations in Yangon) produces the richest, fishiest broth (if you prefer it thinner, you are better off at Myaung Mya Daw Cho). Tin Tin Aye’s broth is made in a factory somewhere in Okkalapa, an old kingdom of Myanmar on the outskirts of Yangon. Apparently it tastes so good because of the special salt that they bring from the seaside resort of Ngapali, but it could also be the MSG, which adds a special zing to most breakfast options in the Golden Land.

Hackney Bureau, Hackney

Hackney Bureau
3 Mare St
Hackney
E8 4RP
020 8533 6083
www.hackneybureau.com

by Typhoo Mary

I mooched my way to brunch, the first time in Hackney for four years, beyond the beginning of the Saturday kerfuffle of Broadway Market, arriving at the Bureau in a slightly detached frame of mind.

There were chilled beats and big bay windows, allowing one to gaze out at the multitudes of white vans roaring past on a soggy Mare Street. There was a lot of light wood: cork floors, mixed and matched tables and chairs with an open plan kitchen. Above my head, it looked like someone had pulled the ceiling down and thought – bare boards, bare lightbulbs, concrete I-beams, protruding nails and visible trap doors – that looks GREAT, let’s just leave it like that. If Rachel Whiteread visited, she’d embalm it all in resin.

I thought that for my first LRB review, I should go traditional with a full English (£8.50). I decided on poached eggs, and there was not a flicker of disapproval when I asked for fried tomato rather than black pudding. The veggy option, £7.50 had also looked tempting, with mashed up avocado and sourdough bread. Another option, truffled mushrooms, had also appealed, although the mention of rocket should have been a warning for what was to come.

The French chef bore more than a passing resemblance to Matt the Horn from the Blues Brothers sans hair net and saxophone. The waitress made a comment about the distance to her art studio. A father and his sons came in silently, in football strips, presumably from a Vicky Park practice. The boys looked miserable. Perhaps their team had lost. Perhaps their dad was the coach. He looked stern as he barked at them as to whether they wanted bacon rolls. Which were not on the chalk board menu… Regulars then? A small child gleefully was sat in the window pulling a huge croissant into piles of decorative crumbs. His beatific American mother carefully sipped her soy latte.

The counter groaned under a huge pile of pastries. I am always suspicious when there are so many cakes – are they fresh is my question… But I suspect one of my usual companions to brunch, Edwardian Man, would have been pleased at the breadth of selection. But he was in Russia with his lady, so he’ll have to wait.

Artist/Waitress cheerfully delivered my breakfast. The poached eggs looked perfect, the tomatoes golden, the bacon crispy, and although the sausage was cut in two to be fried flat on a hotplate (not aesthetically pleasing please note chefs – it indicates a need-for-speed over traditional means) it looked home-made or at least well-sourced so I was pacified. The baked beans were home-made, carrots and beetroot ahoy, and were DELICIOUS. (I first came across baked beans with veg in my stalwart Little Georgia, and these beans could give them a run for their money). The bread was glorious. But hold on, wait a moment, what’s this… Oh dear god. SALAD? Salad with DRESSING?

Like vampire films, brunch will always have its variety on the core themes – different riffs on bread, bacon, black pudding, baked beans, but never in my life have I seen a full English with a handful of salad garnish. Dressed garnish no less. These were jolly leaves, and they looked like they were dressed well – but in my book the only thing green on a brunch platter should be wilted spinach with eggs Florentine. Et c’est TOUT! Edwardian Man would have sniffed. I, in turn, did not touch the jolly salad.

I had a second coffee, which was much better than the first, and a teeny blueberry friand from the mound of cakes. It was fresh. It was delicious. It gave me that brunch pudding hit I love.

A bevy of men came in. They all looked French. Some ordered coffee. Their arrival had pushed back the rain, and when I left, the sun had come out on Mare Street.