The Breakfast Bible: what people are saying (part two)

Earlier round-up here. Buy The Breakfast Bible at any bookshop or online, for example here, here or here.

Jonathan Gibbs, The Independent: "If cook books work then it’s in giving some kind of context to the recipes they contain. Now, obviously for some people, a picture of a cheeky Essex lad perched on a scooter, or a culinary goddess coyly sampling her wares gives all the context you need – flicking through one of these books is like flicking through a magazine. Alternatively you might want some information to browse, which is where The Breakfast Bible seems to offer a neat solution. Written by Seb Emina ‘and’ Malcolm Eggs (the same person) based on ‘their’ London Review of Breakfasts blog, it’s essentially a cross between a recipe book and Schott’s Miscellany, with its recipes interspersed with essays, facts and diversions. I particularly like the ‘Songs to Boil an Egg to’." [Read more]

Alex Heminsley and Claudia Winkleman, BBC Radio 2 Arts Show: "We are literally weeping! Weeping with joy."

Josh Raymond, The Times Literary Supplement: "Emina devotes a chapter to each of "The Magic Nine" components of a full English fry-up and goes on to describe "fast-breakers" from around the world, interspersing recipes and advice on buying ingredients with short essays on subjects ranging from reading tea leaves to breakfast proverbs. "Songs to Boil an Egg to" stands out by providing pieces of music whose durations correspond to cooking times (Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" will, ironically, yield only "medium"). Other, more complex, directions produce flavoursome results – the "omelette Arnold Bennett" combines haddock, gruyere and nutmeg – and the language is toothsome too. The supermarket cereal aisle is "a dazzling cardboard Manhattan" and bacon is "the last temptation of the vegetarian and the Jew". Of eating breakfast in bed, we are asked, "are you feeling decadent and pampered, or imprisoned and a little squalid? This attractively produced book is deceptively ambitious."

Seb Emina (co-author), The Guardian Review: "Breakfast is not love, or war, or death, or life. It is not one of the great themes of literature." [Read more]

David Leafe, The Daily Mail: "Nutritionists might shudder at some of his choices, but Churchill obviously appreciated what they have been telling us for years — that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, or the ‘sexiest’, according to the American poet Anne Sexton. That message is at the heart of an entertaining new book called The Breakfast Bible, written by food journalist Seb Emina. The most fascinating passages describe the breakfasts enjoyed by famous people over the centuries." [Read more]

Nikki Spencer, Living South (cover story): "It's a practical book, but an entertaining book, too, including good songs to boil an egg to (Roxette's Listen to Your Heart, apparently) and a page of Freud's Breakfast Dream."

Kerstin Rodgers, Ms Marmite Lover: "Breakfast is a neglected meal in terms of cookery books, until the twin-headed Seb/Malcolm wrote the recently released and rather brilliant 'The Breakfast Bible'. Written in customary witty style, with great research into the origins of breakfast food stuffs, musings on the philosophy of the first meal, this book reminds me of Schotts Miscellaney, lots of fun facts but with recipes." [Read more]

Carolyn Hart, The Lady: "The Breakfast Bible, published by Seb Emina, founder of the cheekily named (given the august presence of the similarly titled London Review Books) The London Review Of Breakfast blog. Emina and his merry gang of breakfast bloggers - Blake Pudding, HP Seuss, Poppy Tartt and Malcolm Eggs - have been described as a 'band of breakfast-obsessed radicals', bestowing the same amount of serious attention on breakfast as you might on Ian McEwan's latest novel..." [Read more]

Hannah Rose, Capture the Castle: "Finally getting to live my breakfast tray dream, thanks to a generous Easter Bunny and Freedom Furniture. I can't even begin to relay the delight when I received my gift - the gift of breakfast - a stripey oversized mug, the glorious, glorious, glorious (the third glorious is necessary, trust me) Breakfast Bible by Seb Emina." [Read more]

James Ramsden, Guardian Word of Mouth blog: "The Great British fry-up? This is the most overrated of British dishes, the scourge of the breakfast table, and the cruellest of ends for some of our finest produce [...] 'I find your views shocking and upsetting,' says Seb Emina, author of the Breakfast Bible. 'Fry-ups are a way of showing off good ingredients. You take bacon, egg, black pudding, mushrooms etc, cook them to your liking, and arrange them on a plate. That's it.' But that's not a dish. It's a few ingredients, cooked identically, then forced to compete for your attention. Perhaps 'British breakfast mezze' might make a better epithet. 'It's interactive, customisable,' argues Emina..." [Read more]

Katy Salter, Guardian Word of Mouth blog: "So if cleaning the kitchen afterwards is the first rule of successful breakfast in bed, what are the others? 'Arrange everything properly,' says Seb Emina, author of The Breakfast Bible. 'Pillows are important – they need a decent set to support both back and head when they are sitting upright. You don't want to be at less than a 90-degree angle when you're eating. Don't forget the small touches either – flowers, music and a handmade card or drawing.'" [Read more]

Cool Culinaria: "Author Seb Emina, who writes a blog about our first meal of the day under his alter ego Malcolm Eggs, has written a great history of the breakfast in his book "The Breakfast Bible". Along with ways to time your boiled egg to perfection – by listening to particular songs – it’s a fount of information about other people’s breakfast habits." [Read more]

India Knight, on Twitter: "A small masterpiece." [Link]

Stylist Magazine: "Every witty, wise and wonderful thing you can do with words about the first meal of the day is found in The Breakfast Bible."

Maddy Hubbard, The Mancunion: "Clearly, this is a man that respects breakfasts and treats it with due reverence and sincerity. One would be a fool to visit London without referring to the London Review of Breakfasts, and now his new book will enable lovers of breakfast to create the perfect breakfast at home as well." [Read more] 

Clara Silva, i Newspaper (Portugal): "'Eggs and Sausage', de Tom Waits, 'Breakfast In America', dos Supertramp, 'Nice Girls Don’t Stay for Breakfast', de Julie London, ou 'St Alphonso’s Pancake Breakfast', de Frank Zappa. Se está farto de pequenos-almoços silenciosos, inspire-se nas músicas da playlist de Malcolm Eggs, o alter-ego de Seb Emina, o autor do livro 'The Breakfast Bible', o título essencial daquela que dizem ser a refeição mais importante do dia." [Read more]

Prufrock Café, Clerkenwell

Prufrock Café
23-25 Leather Lane
Clerkenwell
EC1N 7TE
207 242 0467
www.prufrockcoffee.com

by Bee Loobury

***caveat***
This writing considers only a single aspect of this lovely café, which deserves far more comprehensive appraisal.

One day a week I rise relatively early and head to Clerkenwell. As I am not a morning person it’s pretty much all I can do to make it in to work on time. So it’s no surprise that I don’t usually have time for a breakfast outing. That said last Wednesday there was a confluence of perfectly timed tube, train, and bus routes that left me with an extra 20 minutes before work. This gift from the heavens (or TFL, take your pick) allowed me to do something I’d been dreaming of.

For the past few months I‘ve spent my workday lunches at Prufrock Café, and consistently my eyes have been drawn to one particular item on the menu board – cinnamon toast. Now before I continue and extoll the virtues of this delectable treat I am going to write something that some may consider sacrilegious, especially when writing about Prufrock: I don’t drink coffee.

I know, this place is a coffee mecca, coffee is their raison d’etre, they have a coffee training center fer chrissake. And I can appreciate the sensuous aroma, the art of the barista, the paraphernalia, the stunning milky decoration, even the political aspect of the bean; it’s just not my thing. So I won’t be writing about the coffee at this coffee house as I am obviously not qualified. I prefer tea.

And this is where I find myself with just enough time for tea and toast. And the ultimate tea and toast at that. This cinnamon toast is not just your everyday stick-some-bread-in-the-toaster, slather-on-some-butter-and-sprinkle-with-a-bit-of-sugar-and-cinnamon. Oh no, this is GRIDDLED CINNAMON TOAST. Hot and melting with dark spice and sweetness. This must have been what in earlier centuries people experienced when cinnamon first arrived to the West. Almost tart aromatic spice caramelized and generously lathered on a freshly sliced loaf exceeded my weeks of expectation. This was my reward for having eaten properly balanced meals all those lunchtimes. Not that I had suffered in any way!

Prufrock does some of the best soups and stews around and always has yummy cheese or avocado on toast, too. But, knowing I’d be returning to the second half of my workday, I felt obliged to be sensible; protein would be required to endure the remaining hours and not start to flag and fade away come 4 o’clock. So the decadent pleasure of their sideboard, groaning with cakes and pies, tarts and brownies, had to wait. I think this might have made the griddled cinnamon toast taste even better – if that’s even possible.

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.

Ozone Coffee Roasters, Shoreditch

Ozone Coffee Roasters
11 Leonard St
Shoreditch
EC2A 4AQ
ozonecoffee.co.uk
020 7490 1039

by Homefries Bogart

My breakfasts on the internet have taken a skyward theme. The last visit had seen me enter a cloud and this time I was in Ozone, although oddly both places seem to be at street level. And they told me my research was off. Hah! 

I am not an early breakfast person, which is why at 9am, overlooking the chefs from my bar seat at Ozone Coffee, I was surprised to have ordered a ricotta maple pancake with candied walnuts and dried fig. 

Pancakes are not my area of expertise, but it was safe to say that neither I nor my Belgian or Canadian companions had ever seen a cake of such tectonic proportions. I mean this thing was the Earth's crust, a 'platter' pretty much the size of Tibet. I tried to explain this to a fellow baker later on in the day, and he didn't understand a word I was saying.

Was it any good? 

The Canadian wasn't sure. It was a little cakey for her. The Belgian was politely speechless (probably still taking in the vastness). But I say yes.

It wore its size with confidence. Its crispy crust alone was probably thicker than most other pancakes. I felt like I was on the breakfast table of Honey I Shrunk The Kids. In Tibet. 

It was on the cakey side, but that's not to say it wasn't fluffy and light. The maple syrup had drizzled through nicely, and although I thought I was going to get away with it, ended up ordering a tad more, which I do every time. 

I find that when fruit comes with a pancake it can make the affair a bit polite, but the combo of the ricotta, walnuts and dried fig had an elevated earthyness and did a damn good job at telling the bacon where to stick it. 

Perched up high in this spacious urban coffee shop with benefits, I was ready to climb down the mountain and be on my way. A few raised eyebrows from my new Ozone friendlies at the almost emptied plate and I was out the door wondering where breakfast will take this adopted Antipodean next.

The Breakfast Bible: what people are saying

Last updated: 26 February 2013.

Here is a round-up of what everyone's been saying about our book The Breakfast Bible.

Eleanor Morgan, The Observer: "Is it funny as well as practical? Of course... Among the lovely breakfast recipes from around the world, the book has surreal interludes such as the page dedicated to a dream Freud once had about a breakfast ship... We say: Seb is to breakfast what Brian Cox is to space." [Read more]

India Knight, on Twitter: "This book about breakfasts is a small masterpiece." [Link]

John Koski, Daily Mail: "Food Book of the Week: What a sizzling-in-the-pan treat it is, a witty, informative and irresistible celebration of the history, philosophy and practice of the ‘most important meal of the day’. Like one of those build-your-own-breakfast menus, this is a book where you can pick and mix whatever takes your fancy and be guaranteed a rewarding read." [Read more]

Extract in the Financial Times here: "The meaning of breakfast: is it the best meal of the day? A new book looks at the idiosyncratic – and delicious – dimensions of the morning meal."

Stylist Magazine: "Every witty, wise and wonderful thing you can do with words about the first meal of the day is found in The Breakfast Bible."

John-Paul Ford Rojas, (front page of!) The Daily Telegraph: "Seb Emina, author of The Breakfast Bible, said that swapping a proper breakfast for a rushed meal on the way to work might be responsible for giving people the feeling that they were much busier than they really were." [Read more]

Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian: "Should we talk over breakfast? Heavens no, argues Seb Emina, author of The Breakfast Bible... My fear is that Emina is legitimising the insane sensibilities of the morning grump who refuses to engage in human interaction until they've had their coffee." [Read more]

Oliver Pritchett, The Daily Telegraph: "Breakfast is the best time for couples to talk, I believe. Although Seb Emina, author of The Breakfast Bible, has suggested that we eat our corn flakes without exchanging a word, I’m convinced this is the time when the quality of communication between husbands and wives is at its peak." [Read more]

Virginia Blackburn, The Daily Express: "Seb Emina has just come up with the best piece of advice I have heard for years: people should not talk during breakfast. "If there are other people in the room don't feel obliged to speak to each other," the author of a book called The Breakfast Bible said." [Read more]

Amy Verner, The Globe and Mail (Canada): "The author of a new book titled The Breakfast Bible is quoted in the Telegraph as telling BBC’s Radio 4 that people need not ‘“feel obliged to speak to each other”’ nor ‘“feel offended if the room is completely silent.”... Anyone who devotes a whole book to breakfast – musical accompaniments, recipes, international fare and more – might simply be making a case that we should be eating better before the noon hour." [Read more]

Agenda, The Independent: "Bring some serious joy to that most important meal of the day with this new book of recipes, tips, essays and musings." [Read more]

Richard Godwin (contributor), Evening Standard: "At the London Review of Breakfasts — the online journal established by my friend Malcolm Eggs in 2005 after a slightly disappointing experience in a Kentish Town greasy spoon — we have come to view breakfast not only as an excellent source of puns, but as the embodiment of the city." [Read more]

Maddy Hubbard, The Mancunion: "While firmly focused on the subject of breakfast, the form is more literary than food blog.... Clearly, this is a man that respects breakfasts and treats it with due reverence and sincerity. One would be a fool to visit London without referring to the London Review of Breakfasts, and now his new book will enable lovers of breakfast to create the perfect breakfast at home as well." [Read more]

Hot List, Fabric Magazine: "Chock full or recipes, advice, illustrations and oh-so-appetising info on everything from famous last breakfasts to Freud's breakfast dream, this is the most important manual on the most important meal of the day." [Read more]

Jessica Carter, Fed Up and Drunk: "Within its almighty pages, this book holds a wealth of divine knowledge, supreme guidance, and righteous advice that (I reckon) we could all do with in our lives – especially first thing in the morning." [Read more]

Henry Jeffreys, Henry's World of Booze: "It’s a book to cook from and to savour in bed. As a contributor to the book and the website, I can with all disinterest say that it’s timeless masterpiece." [Read more]

99 ways to have breakfast

Here's a guest illustration by Badaude featuring Oxfork in Oxford. To view, just click and enlarge:

Our book: The Breakfast Bible

Our book's cover

We love going out for breakfast but we also love staying in for breakfast. We love it when, while still lazing in bed, we decide what we want and then realise we have the ingredients we need. We love the comforting crackle of a grill full of bacon and the promising hiss of a tea-bound kettle. We love it when it all comes together just so and we sit down to a plate on which the food is hot, the yolk is runny and the toast is buttered, and there is a hot drink, and a cold drink, and our guests are delighted and our day is already worthwhile. That's not to say we don't love the solitude of a breakfast before work, the way in which we strive to make the morning's toast, porridge or cereal just a bit better than yesterday's. We love that too.

Simply put, we love breakfast – all of the breakfasts, all of the time.

So we are pleased, excited and a little nervous to announce the publication of our book, The Breakfast Bible. Published by Bloomsbury, it will hit the shelves on the week of 11 February 2013. There really couldn't be a better week in which to release a book about breakfast than one containing both Pancake Day and the inexplicably forgotten Collop Monday, on which it is traditional to gorge your face with loads of bacon and eggs.

The Breakfast Bible is in part a compendium of recipes for the classic and time-honoured dishes of breakfasting tradition around the world. Alongside an exploration of the magic nine ingredients of a full English breakfast, it contains methods for everything from eggs Florentine to the perfect Bloody Mary, as well as the best pop and rock songs to boil an egg to ('Listen to your Heart' by Roxette is one perfectly-timed song) and a note on Sigmund Freud's 'breakfast dream', which we think gives a new insight into his true beliefs about what drives us all. And much more.

The book was largely researched and written by a team of five – Emily Berry Richard Godwin, Henry Jeffreys, Peter Meanwell and me. But in the spirit of collaboration from which this website was born, there are contributions from breakfasters across the world.

To be honest, Bloomsbury have created an object so beautiful that it almost doesn't matter what we wrote.

Find it in your nearest bookshop or online, for example here at the Foyle's website, here at Bloomsbury or here at Amazon.

Seb Emina, Editor-at-large
3 February 2013

Special dispatch: The Rex St. Lucian Hotel, St Lucia

The Rex St. Lucian Hotel

Rodney Bay
St. Lucia
WI
www.rexresorts.com

by Emmanuel Petit-Déjeuner

The St. Lucian by Rex Resorts is the oldest swinger in town... Forty-odd years it's been snoozing amiably on one of the better beaches, as boutique upstarts wax and wane island-wide. Big or small though, pricey or not, they all fall prey to that charming yet notorious Lucian horizontality that sees swimming pools regularly built 'lickle but DEEP BWOY!' due to volume taking precedence over area at the planning stage. 

Still, you can experience wonderful culinary excess in St. Lucia, as was the case with the job in hand – breakfast. Setting aside the quotidian hazards of the all-inclusive resort (pre-printed apology cards to cover a range of likely gripes arrived like clockwork, accompanied by mollifying Israeli cava faster than we could drink it) this was one arena in which our tired old maid of a hotel truly perked up.

The usual cornucopia of pastries, cereals and eye-wateringly fresh fruit (guava, paw-paw, soursop and green fig all delivered with alacrity by Crazy Laughing Machete Fruit Boat Guy) was augmented with above average scrambled eggs, admirably crisp bacon and the noble rot of the pancake and French Toast station. This last had Les Mini Petit-Déjeuners excitedly klanging an imaginary countertop bell and demanding "Breakfast number four pleeeeease!" in the manner of a particularly gluttonous bank cashier.

To one side, with the mercury hot enough even at 7am to make your own T-1000, the luckless omelette sous-chef stood sweating like John Leslie in full whites and a toque (vraiment de trop, non?). A more wan individual it was impossible to imagine, but despite his five vicious burners turning his kitchen corner into a close approximation of Tartarus, he could do things with a spatula that would embarrass many Michelin-botherers back home.

Add to this a surprising and delightful array of local specialities freshly made each day, from the lip smacking akkra fritters (black-eyed peas and saltfish flakes to you or I) to the primordially satisfying griddled plantain and cassava (plus a few curve-balls in the rather unedifying shape of deep-fried dumpling 'bakes', the terminally weird breadfruit – imagine making a salad with DHL foam packing pellets - and baked beans wearing their Sunday best Scotch Bonnets) and we could have lingered there for hours if it weren't for the lonely flagon of Piz Buin crying in Chalet No.4.

So would we go back to St. Lucia? For sure. Almost certainly not to that particular hotel, but did the breakfast linger in the memory? By jingo yes... and who knows, come Jazz Festival time, if you see a somewhat sun-kissed 'heavy fork' bogling under the palms with a stack of perilously teetering pancakes - say bonjour, do.