Hawksmoor, Spitalfields

***AUG 2012 UPDATE: BREAKFAST AT THE SPITALFIELDS BRANCH IS NOW ONLY THE HKMUFFIN. FULL BREAKFAST SERVED AT GUILDHALL BRANCH. BELOW REVIEW STILL SOMEWHAT RELEVANT TO THAT, BUT WILL TRY AND WRITE UP ONE DAY. SEE THEIR WEBSITE FOR DETAILS, TIMES AND SO ON.***

Hawksmoor
157 Commercial Street
Spitalfields
E1 6BJ
020 7247 7392
www.thehawksmoor.co.uk

by Malcolm Eggs

If Commercial Street was a 1990s wall poster it'd be the type that on first glance looked like particularly revolting wallpaper but would, when you defocused your eyes just so, reveal a 3D image of a howling wolf, an Aztec pyramid or a giant bowler hat containing a crying, hexagonal eye. Equally, this key transit route on the London Inner Ring Road looks on the face of it exactly like, well, a major transit road on the London Inner Ring Road. But squint and focus on the middle distance and other things fade into view: a luxury hair salon, a man in shorts and cowboy boots, a shop selling Banksy prints. Suddenly you are in a 'creative village'.

Keep concentrating. There's something else - a doorway flanked by a menu, barely signposted, almost camouflaged against the tangled shadows of this stupid analogy. It's Hawksmoor, the best steak and cocktail joint in London, now serving a brunch aimed squarely at the customer who demands evidence of his agreeable position in the food chain.

This service is resoundingly delivered by their magnum opus the Hawksmoor Breakfast, £30 for two to share. The sausages alone contain three verses - oink oink, baa baa and moo moo - of Old Macdonald Had a Farm. Then you discover bubble and squeak laced with tender short rib beef, toast soaked in dripping, beans infused with pulled pork, a large smoked bacon chop, a huge cut of black pudding, fried eggs, fleshy mushrooms, explosive roast tomatoes and a neat hunk of cow bone with the marrow exposed. I am, this breakfast tells me, king of the whole pigging world. It tastes good too. The sausage is, as John Torode might yell, "packed with flavour" and the bacon chop is like the core of a star made entirely from umami. A sole stumble is the slightly stiff, flavourless black pudding.

Their extensive brunch booze list meanwhile has not so much been compiled as curated: we share a gin Bloody Mary washed down with a detailed account of the drink's history, as recounted by a barman as oracular and hungover as his role strictly demands.

We pay our £50 and I reflect that I have found the very definition of an event breakfast: elsewhere on the menu are a slightly chastened Full English, a lavish reimagining of a sausage and egg McMuffin and a whole section dedicated to Longhorn steak and eggs. When I finally work out how to turn breakfast writing into hard cash you'll find me cackling over a 1.1kg Chateaubriand with two fried eggs and half a lobster, a mere snap at £159.

The Priory, Roehampton

The Priory
Priory Lane
Roehampton
SW15 5JJ
020 8876 8261
www.priorygroup.com

by Bloody Mary

So obviously mental hospitals aren’t famed for their food, but this one costs a small fortune, so it should be. The anorexics are fed elsewhere – well, unless only part of your problem is anorexia, in which case you have to cope with the other crazies looking at you as you sniff your apple. Any other food issues and you’re in with the rest of us, the mildly insane. Fortunately, the secure unit also are fed separately, behind the high wall around Scary Compound where they are locked away – so I cant vouch for their eating conditions – but lets hope, if they are to have any chance at all, that their food was better.

Loony bin cooks don’t want to upset the patients, but they don’t really want to waste anything on people who believe all glasses to be half-empty at the best of times. The Priory have clearly decided that a way to make the inmates happy and the restaurant staff happy is to give the former a rough facsimile of what they want to eat, but made so horrible they don’t hang about and annoy the latter.

Mornings aren’t good times for loons, in general, so it’s not the happiest breakfast you’ve ever seen. Sad faces slouch in, stare at the eggs, find the last cling-filmed muesli and a pear and slouch out again. But the manics make up for the silence with their nice loud laughing, the drunkies & junkies are relatively perky in the morning, and the lady who liked to play with food with her toes adds “colour”. Some kind nurse might have brought in the Metro, so you could read about crucial hairstyle changes for Peaches Geldof.

Fried food in vast oily vats are slapped down at 7 and left to harden until 10am. Congealed egg and chipolatas, fried potatoes the consistency of shoes and gritty little nipples of mushroom lie miserably next to each other like failed suicide attempts. The Priory fryery was so bad that I couldn’t indulge my schooldays fetish for crap fryups. I would press a crunchy sliver of streaky bacon, if it had not disintegrated, between two slices of brown bread and drown it in a bloodbath of ketchup. Then I too, would nick a pear and slouch out. The healthy table all looked so dry.

Drink? Well, the coffee at the Priory has no caffeine in it. Crazies aren’t allowed caffeine – so coffee becomes useless, sour fluid that burns your mouth. Milk is in little UHT cartons that cause spectacular ejaculations over depressives sticking thumbs in them. On the plus side, there’s a LOT of fresh juice and pre-made hot chocolate, and these are very good.

A more radiant, sparkly breakfast - blueberries and strawberries in the muesli, french toast cut into sunbeams, pastries with jam and honey and cream, fresh roasted coffee, shimmering poached eggs - might have helped us bust through the day, boosting our fragile immune systems and bringing joviality to the depressed. But admittedly there, the biggest improvement would have been caffeine.

The Cat & Cucumber, Bermondsey

The Cat & Cucumber
182 Tower Bridge Road
London
SE1 2AD
020 7407 2945

by Sadie Frosties

Working in the cobbled streets of Shad Thames it feels as if every day the concrete and glass blah of the More London development creeps ever closer, like a real-estate T1000. The glory of this area is that despite the obvious regeneration and Conran Cluster, the warehouses and elevated walkways remain, as do the original building names - cardamom, vanilla, sesame, tea, nutmeg - all a nod to the commodities they once housed.

I often fancy at the whimsical name of my favourite caff. How wonderful it would be that alongside the Vanilla Courts and the Wheat Wharfs this was once the centre of the cat and the cucumber trades, handily positioned beside the railway to enable the easy distribution of felines and cultivated gourds to the Kentish heartlands.

Perhaps this is just a ridiculous daydream of another bored office drone, or perhaps just a touch of this industrial atmosphere remains. Either way, the Cat & Cucumber is a Bermondsey institution. The format is one of strict order; one must approach the counter, order quickly from the vast menu and then find a seat, mindful all the while not to lose your numbered ticket. Your task is then to attempt to maintain a non-distracted conversation with your fellow diner while you keep an ear on the numbers bellowed from the counter, and an eye on the steady succession of plates being hurried past you.

I order bacon, eggs, bubble and mushrooms - in my mind the optimum breakfast combination - but on the particular day in question, in celebration of meeting with up with an old west-country comrade, I add a sausage. The fried eggs are of that glorious oil-basted, crisp-free quality, the bubble is laced with green cabbage, and the bacon cooked to catching point. I forget the mushrooms. The sausage – dear reader you will be more than familiar which such a sausage – is of the perfectly cylindrical variety so prevalent in the caff community. But just like those repugnant recovered chicken-face frankfurters you secretly buy from Lidl, everyone has a guilty pleasure. Sat in my office clothes and heels, ladling perfectly fried goods and questionable sausage towards my face, the Cat & Cucumber is my weekday Lidl frankfurter - and I shan’t hear a bad word said about it.

Little Portland Cafe, Fitzrovia

Little Portland Cafe
15 Little Portland St
Fitzrovia
W1W 8BW
020 7636 1439

by Malcolm Eggs

An email arrived from Catherine Carr, a reporter for the Radio 4 show You and Yours. A survey had found that the bacon sandwich at Claridge’s was, at £11.50, the most expensive in the country. Would I like to meet her there to discuss this in about half an hour?

My immediate response was to go and brush my teeth. I needed two minutes to think about it all: my toothbrush contains a timer and whatever I decided, I would need clean teeth. I started at the lower left, fretting that I would go on air in front of several million of my fellow citizens and come across like an oaf or a charlatan by nervously blurting out pompous, anachronistic terms like ‘oaf’ or ‘charlatan’. But by the top right molars, I was determined to give it a go. I figured there is only so far a man can go wrong when talking about bacon; and anyway, it sounded like a fucking good sandwich.

By the time I’d offered a response, Catherine had been turned down by Claridge’s, then the Dorchester, so the assignment had changed a little. She was to collect an almost as expensive sandwich from The Langham and I was to meet her at the Little Portland Cafe, all within sprinting distance of the BBC’s central London operation. I would sit down, try sandwiches from both places, and compare and contrast them in front of a large microphone. We met outside and she plunged in, recording the sounds of the affable owner, the beleaguered chef, the sizzling bacon and the chatting men (for they were all men). The room was packed. My sandwiches arrived.

To make a Little Portland bacon sandwich, they start the bacon in the oven then finish it off by frying it, before delivering it to the counter to be placed between two slices of white bread. The finished product costs £1.90. It’s a process replicated in greasy spoons across the land and it always makes something pretty delicious – the inherent divinity of bacon makes sure of that. This particular sandwich was at the top end of the spectrum, not a surprise after a wait spent observing table after table of incredible-looking fried breakfasts. As for The Langham, I'm afraid to say their £8.50 bacon and brioche number was dry and had a texture like Frazzles in a bath sponge. The sweet taste of the brioche fought needlessly with the over-crispy bacon.

I blathered something along those lines in the direction of the microphone. We thanked the owner and went our separate ways. I walked to the British Library, opened my laptop, and after an hour began Googling hysterically for some kind of public reaction. When none came, I think I was relieved.

Op-Egg: Tinie Tempah's penchant for nice tea

by Blake Pudding
Rappers have a taste for the finer things in life and not only do they love luxury goods but they love telling us about their love of luxury goods. Cristal champagne is the most famous example but Courvoisier, Bentley and Rolex have all been praised by hip hop types. Now no one likes conspicuous consumption more than me, but isn’t it a little disappointing that they went for such obvious brands?

If I was in a position to influence popular tastes then I’d go for something more distinctive; something that speaks of taste without being pretentious. This must have been the thinking behind top grime artist Tinie Tempah’s (real name Patrick Okogwu) decision to plug Yorkshire Tea on twitter yesterday. His exact words were “Omdz move over PG Tips.” I’m not sure exactly what he means but the sentiment is clear – Mr Tempah is a discerning tea drinker and he is not afraid to shout about it. Not as discerning, however, as one of his fans who comments that he prefers Yorkshire Gold calling it “the Cristal of teas”.

Tinie Tempah is currently riding high in the charts with Pass Out. Let’s hope that Taylors of Harrogate, producers of Yorkshire Tea, will not now try to distance themselves from their place in popular music as the makers of Cristal did so disdainfully with American rappers. Perhaps they would like to sponsor his next tour with a special one off free gig at Bettys Tea Rooms in Northallerton.

Dean Street Townhouse, Soho

Dean Street Townhouse
69-71 Dean Street
Soho
W1D 3SE
020 7434 1775
www.deanstreettownhouse.com

by Cher E. Jamm

It calls us over from across the street. 'Come in, come in' it says, with the call of a siren. We can't resist. It's been too long since we've spent a day together so we've decided to enjoy a secret day off. No-one will ever know; the possibilities are endless.

The sun isn't shining outside, but it may as well be inside. Think cosy country house hotel. Think slick 1950s French bistro. Then mesh the two together sort of, but not really. It's the type of place you want to move into. We're seated at a red banquet. It's hard to believe a branch of the Slug and Lettuce once stood here. The menu appears.

It's early, perhaps only just past half eight, but the place is buzzing with jolly breakfasters, mostly, it seems, made up of Soho's media contingent. This doesn't put us off - we're cocooned from this, in our own little booth, our hands thawing out as we pour steaming cups of tea from a shared pot.

He doesn't falter, and orders Full English as soon as the chirpy waiter trots over again. I hover over grilled kippers for a moment and then order the smoked salmon and scrambled eggs. Kippers seem too uncouth, too harsh, for today.

Breakfast arrives with neither fuss nor bother. An artful Full English: two eggs beaming like two small suns; the bacon is crisp and refined; the mushrooms, silky and somewhat obscene; the sausage lies puffed and glistening next to a grilled tomato, which, as usual, is nothing more than a grilled tomato; the black pudding is elegance on a plate.

He pushes the black pudding to one side. He's gone off it these days. I urge him to have a small taste (for you, dear reader, all for you). He refuses. A flash of anger passes over us, but it would be a shame to break the spell, at least so early on.

We eat in careful silence, stealing glances at one another, attempting to gauge the other's mood. The salmon is pale and delicious, the scrambles creamy and delicate, but I seem to have lost my appetite, I don't appreciate them fully. I'm sorry. He has finished eating, declaring it possibly the best he's ever had. No eye contact. Only the fat disk of blood sausage remains. A quiet and cold reminder of how we walk on wire.

Caravan, Clerkenwell

Caravan
11 - 13 Exmouth Market
Clerkenwell
EC1R 4QD
020 7833 8115
caravanonexmouth.co.uk

by Malcolm Eggs

"The beans were just roasted this morning," said the barista, as if by way of warning. "So if there's a certain... fruitiness to the flavour that will be why."

I hereby coin the term 'caravan apology', as in 'an apology for a benevolent state of affairs'. See: "I'm sorry I'm so early" or "I'm sorry, I know we said we wouldn't do presents"; this was the finest cup of coffee I have set to my lips in as long as I can remember, the froth patterned exactly like one of those 70s ring-binders and the taste smoother than a Don Draper infidelity binge.

We ordered baked eggs with chorizo and a side of black pudding. The latter, from Franconia in Putney, was remarkable - light, subtly smoky and, within a matter of seconds, absent. The chorizo and eggs (£11 for two) were delivered chicken madras-style in a handled silver pot, the chorizo bits lurking like crocodiles in a crimson-doused pool of red pepper, green parsley, piquant oily sauce, Greek yoghurt and gloopy, friendly eggs. It became a proper mess, but a bloody delectable one.

What about the service? Tap water was poured immediately without request, then replenished zealously. The room itself? Attractive and light, a mix of Wellington cocktail bar, London bistro and a branch of All Saints. Well-heeled new mothers and rubber-heeled freelancers have already formed a demographic stand-off.

If I must have a gripe, it's that the 'Caravan Fry Up' is £8 but comprising eggs, bacon, tomatoes, soy mushrooms and toast is holding back on some treasures: black pudding and bubble are available but must be ordered as sides at up to £3.50 each. Vietnam-style mission creep is a danger.

Four and a half years ago, I was in this same room - it being until recently Al's Café Bar - complaining in the first ever LRB review that the bacon was only cooked on one side. "I'm sorry you closed, Al's," can be my first caravan apology.

The Three Bells, Heathrow Airport

The Three Bells
Terminal Three (pre-security)
Heathrow Airport
TW6 1AD
020 8897 6755

by Joyce Carol Oats

This is the thing about restaurants in airports: they shouldn’t be good. They should be pretty bad. If they were good you might want to linger there, might regret departure, and regretting departure is not something that you should be doing when you are in a place that is all about leaving. We’re pleased to find one, therefore, that strongly resembles a very expensive Wetherspoon’s, and therefore promises to be pretty bad.

Landside restaurants are pretty bad, in particular, because they are full of people being left behind as well as travellers. We are here because only Departing Friend is going: she is emigrating to America, and a trip on this scale, an actual emigration, seemed to require me and Departing Friend’s Brother to pay our respects to her in person, although now we are here we are just grumpy and quiet and sad.  We take our seats amongst the other heavy-hearted people: here, a couple clutching hands over untouched plates of breakfast glazed with cold bacon fat; there, a moist-eyed grandmother, her daughter, two small shouty grandchildren who no one would ever want to sit next to on a plane.

This is the flavour of goodbye: a thick Cumberland sausage patty, an egg, a puffy white bun, ketchup. I sink my teeth into it and am immediately surprised because, I realise, I am expecting it to taste like a McDonald’s sausage McMuffin. And it doesn’t, perhaps because it costs about £5. There’s something distinctly British about that Cumberland flavour, that even the most uninspiring Cumberland-esque sausage lacks something of the metallic tang of one with the McD recipe, probably because it might contain fewer pieces of actual metal.

It is pretty bad. And the coffee is pretty bad. And Departing Friend and Departing Friend’s Brother are ploughing their way through their English breakfasts like it is their duty, but they are pretty bad. Departing Friend cannot face the tomato. I bite it and it tastes like nothing, a small mercy on the part of the chefs, to ensure that in a place so charged with emotion, the flavour of the tomato will evoke no feeling. And by the time we pay (something ridiculous, like £20) and proceed to wave Departing Friend through security, we are all so preoccupied by being sluggish and sickly that we forget to cry.

Christopher's, Covent Garden

Christopher’s
18 Wellington Street
Covent Garden
London WC2E 7DD
020 7240 4222
www.christophersgrill.com

by Sadie Frosties

I hate the art of Edward Hopper. You had the Nighthawks poster. I saw you buying it at the poster sale during fresher’s week in 1995. You’ve imagined yourself there haven’t you, sitting in that diner. You’re that guy, and that there, that’s your lady.

No you’re not. And nor am I. Although it would seem Christopher’s would really like us to believe it to be the case. Christopher’s fancies itself as just this kind of old fashioned American restaurant... Indeed, sitting in one of its velvety cushioned booths, I felt myself slipping into such an illusion and could almost forget the gaggle of lycra-clad 20 year olds drinking vodka cocktails at 11am on a Sunday.

With its attempts at inventive optimism, the food could also be compared (if, say, a breakfast review’s consistency was at stake) to the art of Edward Hopper. Hash brown with Eggs Royale? Weird, but excellent! I am of the unfortunate breakfast disadvantage of being unable to eat wheat products, so the presence of a crunchy potato rectangle cheers me up no end. And when I told the waiter of my lamentable circumstance in the hope of a stealthy muffin substitution I was met with a stony silence and a glare which suggested perhaps in my youth I’d nicked his wallet and slapped his mum. The muffins stayed.

Still, I’ll try to be objective. The poached eggs were really very good, displaying that bulbous, compact quality that I’ve never quite been able to recreate at home, and were not the slightest bit watery. The smoked salmon was thickly cut and abundant. The hollandaise was fine. The orange juice was, I’m told, outstanding, but I plumped for the coffee, which was abhorrent. The curious hash brown was the one part that felt the most authentically American: flaccid and eggy in a McDonaldsy type of way. It was something that even though every fibre of your body wants to, nay knows it should hate, another part of you is unable to stop eating it. But it’s disgusting! But I secretly like it. It’s how I really feel about the art of Edward Hopper.

Fika, Shoreditch

Fika
161a Brick Lane
Shoreditch
E1 6SB
020 7613 2013
www.fikalondon.com

by Joyce Carol Oats

There are few things so stressful as taking a New Yorker to breakfast in London. These people can barely step outside their front doors without tripping over a pile of fresh bagels layered with cream cheese and gravadlax, fluffed stacks of blueberry pancakes, sixteen different varieties of omelettes.

‘You have to take the bus to breakfast?’ says New Yorker One, as we wait for one.

‘It’s raining,’ I say, defensively.

We get to Brick Lane, and I have to think fast: we are hungry, we have just taken a bus, there is a LHR-JFK flight to catch. Albion’s the obvious choice, but I can’t really go back there since the last time when they dropped a stealth prawn into my eggs and a big shellfish-allergy drama ensued. And then I clap eyes on Fika. It’s Swedish. I love Swedish food. I am all about smorgasbords.

‘Do you have Swedish breakfasts in New York?’ I ask my New Yorkers.

‘Not really,’ they say. Win.

The breakfast menu is handed to us by a friendly girl with a fake-looking blonde bob. It’s fake-looking, I realise, because when she turns around it is clear that she hasn’t done a very good job of tucking her perfectly nice brown hair into her blonde wig. This is confusing, and also not propitious: if you can’t make your blonde wig look convincing, will you be able to serve a convincing breakfast? No, you will not.

The choice is not extensive: there are waffles, with a small selection of both sweet and savoury toppings. There are eggs on toast. The bread, according to the menu, is likely to be sourdough. That sounds nice, I think. I like a likely sourdough.

The food comes. New Yorker Number Two ordered a waffle with strawberry jam and cream (£4.50); it is brown and flat and looks uninspiring and small, although it tastes OK. But only OK. New Yorker One and I both opted for the fried eggs. The bread, unlikely enough, is not sourdough at all: it is two halves of what seem to be a rather substantial bun that has been dipped in dishwater. Yes, that’s what I said: dishwater. One half of my bun is water-logged and bitter and soap-flavoured.

Is there any point in going on? Need I comment on the texture of the egg (not bad) the flavour of the reindeer sausage that New Yorker One ordered as a side dish (fine for a reindeer sausage, since I have nothing to compare it to), the quality of the coffee (so-so), the fact that the eggs and toast were served with margarine rather than butter (would be gross if I was not contending with dishwatery bread, which made it seem positively delicious by contrast). I think I need not.

But I do need to apologise to the New Yorkers.