The London Review Of Breakfasts - Details

Listing ID: 108

Title: The London Review Of Breakfasts

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.

Category: Recreation : Food & Drink : Food

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listed on: April 01, 2008 07:30:54 PM

Number Hits: 9 times

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La Casita, Streatham - 2010-09-08 14:33:00

La Casita 122 Streatham High Road Streatham SW16 1BW 020 8664 6033 Breakfast served from 9am - 3pm(at time of writing) by Cherie Funghi Waking up late with gin breath requires immediate action: breakfast. And I’m certainly not talking about any of your muesli or fruit stuffs. Wretched and dehydrated, we dragged our broken bodies to La Casita. A sign boasting fresh ground coffee excited my caffeine-thirsty eyes, but my mug arrived with the sad, undissolved remnants of instant granules. I swallowed my disappointment, too tired to argue, before our confused looking waiter informed us that there were no continental breakfasts, no city breakfasts and no tomatoes. At all. A city breakfast, in case it isn’t obvious, is scrambled eggs with smoked salmon on a bagel. That is what people in cities have for breakfast. But not this morning. No. We had the choice of a Vegetarian, a full English, or a La Casita breakfast - the same plus chips. I went for the full English, which turned out to be quite a serious plate-a-food. Two massive bangers, a generous helping of mushrooms, griddled smoked bacon, a hash brown, piles of buttered toast, beansandhalf a grilled tomato. Hello. The sugar sachets came with 2 tsp-worth of sugar in them. I failed to notice and added two to my coffee. It made for a disgusting error of judgment, but I persevered. The scrambled eggs were dry and rubbery so I ate them first to get them out the way, washed down with the coffee-syrup. What a mistake! I’d left no room for the best bits. I managed to force down the pleasingly thick-cut smoked bacon and inoffensively average hash brown, but the delicious buttery, herby mushrooms and meaty pork sausages were a stomach-stretch too far and were left practically untouched. It was a regrettable personal failure and this unhappy turn of events is proof that the best shouldn’t always be saved until last.

Benjys Restaurant, Earl's Court - 2010-08-26 12:00:00

Benjys Restaurant 157 Earls Court Road Earl's Court London SW5 9RQ 020 7373 0245 by Terry Teagleton A fried English breakfast has to my mind one of two essential purposes - to line the stomach in preparation for a day's drinking; or to bring the comforts of stodgy, chewy grease to a body which has spent a yesterday drinking. We are here today for the first of these reasons and this caff - the first we came across on leaving Earl's Court tube - performs its task more than adequately. Benjys gives the impression of a proper no-nonsense London establishment. The laminated menu supplies just three main breakfast options, a terse list of extras confined only to the absolute essentials (no fancy-schmancy hash browns here and even, to my great disappointment, no black pudding) plus tea, coffee and orange juice. In view of the profligate ingurgitations ahead of me, I opt for the builder's breakfast with extra fried mushrooms. Steve foolishly just has chips - a decision which is ill advised not for the lack of substance (Steve is a better drinker than me and anyway has already eaten) but because of the penny-filching minimum food cost of £3.90 per person in the menu's smallprint which will now catch him out. Our food arrives in short order. The sausages are close to perfection - neither soggy nor dry, their unidentifiable contents pleasantly coating the mouth in greasy goodness and sliding effortlessly down the gullet. The same sadly cannot be said about the bacon, which has been incinerated almost into nonexistence and then, bizarrely, hidden *in between* the egg (on top) and the beans (underneath) as though the chef was rightly ashamed of his endeavour. The egg itself is uninspiring - not badly cooked, but one presumes produced by a chicken with little interest in life; and the beans are as beans are as beans always are - the great ubiquitous invariant of the breakfast plate. Most of the other components are proficiently delivered but require little comment - there are chips, mushrooms and toast. The one remaining piece of the assembly is however noteworthy; it is the tomato. Benjys have eschewed the standard fried vegetable for an uncooked plum tomato forked out of a tin. I love the effrontery, the sheer chutzpah, of places which do this - we all know how cheap it is to buy a value tin of plum tomatoes from Tesco and how little effort is invoked in the opening of said tin and fishing out of said tomatoes, and yet it is a solution which Just Works, often better than a fried tomato which is frankly difficult for even the best of breakfasteers to make exciting. As I bite into my raw plum tomato a jet of bright red juice is sent spurting out right onto Steve’s shirt, adding to my general sense of satisfaction with the world. The place is certainly popular, with intrepid tourists out of Earl's Court hotels rubbing shoulders with standard greasy spoon denizens - drifting urban wastrels and labouring men - to almost fill the place. But despite this the lone waitress manages to take orders and deliver plates of food and free refills of tea and coffee promptly and with a breezy professionalism. As we slowly finish our final coffees and get ready to pay and leave, I reflect that in spite of its several quirks Benjys has succeeded - it has produced a solid, ample, unashamedly physical fry up; a fry up to engage oneself with, to take one's time over - in other words, the very breakfast I needed.

The brekkies: 10 of the best breakfasts available to humanity - 2010-08-20 15:52:00

by Malcolm Eggs Exactly five years have passed since a morning when – in no small part to stave off the need to get up, have a shower and do something useful – I logged onto a blogging website and wrotesomething rousingabout how a semi-invented ‘we’ was incredibly passionate about breakfast. It was surprising that the ‘we’ became a self-fulfilling overblown claim: no less than 80 individuals have joined my mission to cut out the gristle of lazy and disdainful breakfast-serving with the simple fork of truth and the trusty knife of literary pretension. Five years in seems like a fitting moment to do something new, and compile a list of some of the best breakfasts we’ve sampled along the way. For the sake of usefulness I’m only including places that (a) are still open and (b) I’m reasonably confident have maintained their standards. A big apology goes to Konstam, recently closed in what is a tragedy both personal and regional – they consistently served some of the finest breakfasts we’d encountered and we miss them very much. Here is the list, in alphabetical order. As always, we apologise for the East London bias. Bistrotheque, 23-27 Wadeson St, Bethnal GreenE2 "It is, without doubt, the mark of a quality establishment, when you are offered the wine list at 11 in the morning." (Full review here) Caravan, 11-13 Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell EC1R "The chorizo and eggs (£11 for two) were delivered chicken madras-style in a handled silver pot" (Full review here) Hawksmoor, 157 Commercial St, Spitalfields E1 "The very definition of an event breakfast." (Full review here) Mess, 38 Amhurst Rd, Hackney E8 "Breakfast for two for just shy of a tenner - full marks for both, and happy tummies all round." (Full review here) Muratori, 162 Farringdon Rd, ClerkenwellEC1R "I'd learnt no more about the postal strike, but for less than £4 had had a lovely breakfast." (Full review here) Regency Cafe, 17-19 Regency St, PimlicoSW1P "Explosively flavourful tomatoes gently frosted with char, a perfectly-fried egg slithering on brown toast of the exact right thickness." (Full review here) The Uplands Cafe, 21 Upland Rd, East DulwichSE22 "The kids in the cafe restored my faith in human kindness after the previous night’s unnecessary violence. And what more could you want from a breakfast outing than that?" (Full review here) The Walpole, 35 St Mary's Rd, Ealing W5 "A hearty, old-fashioned Full English." (Full review here) The Wapping Project, Wapping Wall, WappingE1 "It was a good breakfast." (Full review here) York& Albany, 127-129 Parkway, Camden TownNW1 "A single artisanal Lincolnshire sausage, a slice of Old Spot bacon, a perfectly presented free-range poached egg…" (Full review here)