Listing Details
| ID: | 108 |
| Title: | The London Review Of Breakfasts |
| URL: | http://londonreviewofbreakfasts.blogspot.com/ |
| Category: | Recreation: Food & Drink: Food |
| Description: | Specialising in reviewing the cafes and greasy-spoons of London. The author's mission is to seek out perfect fried-eggs and crispy bacon. |
| Long White Cloud, Shoreditch - 2012-05-14 14:28:00 |
| Long White Cloud 151 Hackney Rd Shoreditch E2 8JL 020 7033 4642 longwhitecloud-hoxton.tumblr.com by Homefries Bogart "Long White Cloud"... we strolled en masse towards Hackney Road, led by Matthias, a friend with a murky culinary history. I hadn't done my research on this but all I could put together was that as 'long black' is a coffee, perhaps 'long white' was a coffee, and cloud is a cloud. He mentioned it was a place run by Australians, but not to worry about that, "they do Monmouth Coffee… it's fine". His tone was in jest, but you never really know. Five of us entered the long, narrow, white room, which looked as much like a cloud as all other long white rooms do, which is exactly the same but with angles and a floor. We sat at the back of the café, at a sort of ‘in-the-family’ table next to an upright piano. It was a good choice, as inevitably with these things, people caught wind of our jaunt and more came. Matthias, with irrational ingenuity, had clocked the last bit of banana bread, and had it sent toasted with butter to the table, as a sort of breakfast amuse bouche. It would trump what was to follow. Accompanying my double espresso with hot water, I had ordered the French toast with bacon, bananas and agave syrup, which, in my head, I had seconds ago read as, 'French toast with crispy bacon and maple syrup'. Its amazing how much the brain assumes when reading. But the French toast was not good. Breakfast goers must surely agree that anything other than crispy bacon, golden, shiny, oily, fluffy, eggy bread and sweet maple syrup is a complete no-no. And it was the EXACT opposite. I’m not even going in to what Agave syrup is because I don’t care. Apart from myself and Oly, a great, foul mouthed Exeter based baker and food blogger (he ordered beans and cheese on toast ), everyone else ordered the veggie breakfast. This was an extravagant mass of nicely roasted vegetables, bulbous slabs of grilled haloumi, piled on top of a huge bit of toasted ciabatta, with a fried egg somewhere in between and their version of baked beans on the side. Definitely LWC’s tour de force. I had obviously missed the memo. Perhaps it has been lost on a white sheet of paper in this long cloud of a café. Overall though, there was madness in the cloud. No wait, method in the cloudness, err white, white...  |
| The Brick Box, Brixton - 2012-05-08 12:05:00 |
| The Brick Box 41 Granville Arcade Brixton SW9 8PR 020 7274 2211 www.thebrickbox.co.uk by Egg Miliband Brixton Village on a Sunday morning smells of stale fish, corrugated iron and puddles. The Brick Box café is a golden door in the desolation. There’s no one around except for a toddler fleeing from his father and a man hammering nails into a broken drawer outside the café. A hoodie-wearing waitress waves us in with laminated menus. It’s snug inside. There are floral tablecloths and ghoulish, childlike paintings on the walls and wine on the shelves. The Spanish-speaking staff seem amiably hungover. Why are we here? For the crepes. Or perhaps the galettes, which employ the same freeform ‘envelope’ system as the crepe but with buckwheat rather than white flour. Feeling rustic, I order one named ‘The Goat’. Ivan, a traditionalist, known to eat crumpets soaked in golden syrup while marching around his house, orders a crepe named ‘The Godfather’. When the waitress brings our breakfast drinks, she sings their names. ‘English Breakfast Tea with soymilk! Americano with normal milk on the side!’ A man of few words, Ivan suddenly has a faraway look in his eyes. ‘This coffee tastes like… the Camino,’ he murmurs. He walked the trail once, El Camino de Santiago. When Ivan does speak, it’s often about those days, when he was a pilgrim. My galette is a rhombus-shaped cushion, spilling out over the plate’s edge. Slicing it open reveals a fulsomeness of melting goat’s cheese, spinach, olives, and sundried and cherry tomatoes. It’s difficult to eat the thing with poise, and I disgrace myself by shovelling in overly large mouthfuls and then accidentally exploding a cherry tomato on my fork, spattering my trousers. Ivan’s crepe – with pepperoni sausage, mixed herbs, and ‘cheese blend’, an ingredient that appears in 80% of the menu items – is crowned with a triumphant fried egg. A rare look of delight flickers across Ivan’s face. He is known to eat like a duck – gulping, not chewing – and when I look up on my third mouthful, his plate is eerily clean and he is gazing over the brim of his coffee mug once more. The main thing, we agree, is that the food is terrific. In fact, I’d never known that breakfast could be this good. All the mediocre breakfasts of my past suddenly weigh on me. The galette is so beautiful that I eat the lettuce on the side. When the waitress collects our plates, still singing, a knife slides off my plate and falls to the floor. ‘Sometimes,’ the waitress whispers, ‘it seems like the cutlery is alive.’ I’m disturbed by this notion, but we all laugh as if this wasn’t a very real possibility.  |
| US Election Dispatch: Tommy's, Cleveland, Ohio - 2012-03-25 18:28:00 |
| Tommy's Restaurant 1824 Coventry Rd Cleveland Heights Ohio OH44118 USA +1 216 321 7757 www.tommyscoventry.com by T.N. Toost Four years ago, when the LRB first went “in field” tocoverthe American presidential primaries, the response among breakfasters was near universal: “I would prefer to vote for Ron Paul, but he has no chance of winning, so I’m voting for (insert second choice here).” It was actually a bit sad how much people preferred Paul and how little faith they had in his electability; it seemed that people had given up on the political system, and rather than fight for their opinions they threw up their hands. Four years later, things have changed. It isn’t so much a difference in peoples’ perceptions of Paul’s electability as a rational and conscious evaluation of the candidates against whom he is running. Yes, of course his ideas are batshit insane. Of course he would put us on course for a complete economic and political meltdown. Of course we’d likely end up in actual civil strife and, perhaps, even civil war. But have you seen the other guys? That, I think, is why the people who your correspondent spoke to this year are not qualifying their choices. No – the Paul supporters this year are voting for their man, come hell or high water, and believe in him fully, because they have already considered Gingrich, Santorum and Romney. They are voting for Paul and, considering his opponents, I think they are making the right choice. So it was that I came to breakfast on Super Tuesday with my friend Gina and one of her friends, Joe, who was wearing a Ron Paul shirt. With nary a word of prompting he launched into an exposition on the exceptional rectitude of the Paul positions – on energy, gold, gay rights, constitutional interpretation, social structures, military intervention, welfare, education, international trade. Paul believes in the world as it should be, and there is no room for dissention. As a reporter and a professional in the mold of Malcolm Eggs, I was a mere observer. Gina, on the other hand, clearly disagreed, but stayed silent. First they came for the communists. Then breakfast arrived, with a healthy side of chips. I had the Zeke, the first thing on the menu – pita piled with eggs, veg and cheese, placed in the middle of a large plate. It was delicious when it cooled down. The chips, though, are perhaps my favorite ketchup delivery mechanism in America today. Hot, thin-cut, perfectly fried, I ate almost the entire plate – perhaps a kilo – and most of Gina’s plate, too. By the end of the meal, Joe and I had gone from talking about voting for Ron Paul to shaking hands on a gentlemen’s competition: we would take one year and try to sleep with direct descendents of every single founding father, documenting our quest for aPechaKucha presentationand, perhaps, a book deal. In the end, Romney barely edged Santorum in Ohio, which disappointed me. I’d voted for Santorum. Yes, he is one of the most vile and despicable human beings alive today outside of, perhaps, Myanmar and good swaths of Africa still at war. My reasoning: none of the Republicans should ever live in the White House, of course, but Romney is the most electable and Santorum the least. If Romney is kept from the nomination, and any of his rivals goes before the nation, it will be much easier for Obama to get another four years. It’s the opposite thinking from the 2008 Ron Paul supporters. Luckily, the win barely lifted Romney’s sails, and the race will drag on, and on, and on, and Americans and the world will continue to be horrified by the state of the American political system. And we’ll see you in a few months.  |