Breakfast is the meal most likely to be hurried at home, grabbed on the way to work or skipped altogether. It’s a poor show for what’s supposed to be the most important meal of the day, but luckily not everyone treats it with such disregard.
London Review of Breakfasts began in 2005, a blog set up by the shady figure Malcolm Eggs to tell Londoners about the best and worst places to start their day. After much subterfuge and secret messages back and forth, we managed to track down Mister Eggs and gave him a good grilling…
London Review of Breakfasts started in 2005 - what inspired you to start reviewing the most important meal of the day?
You know those comic book flashbacks, showing the traumatic event that inspires a child to become a superhero? It was nothing like one of those. One Saturday morning in East Dulwich we went into yet another bar purporting to serve fine food and they served us yet another £8-a-head disappointment: gloopy eggs, raw sausages, a waiter who looked at us like we were unreasonable when we asked for our missing bacon. As we sullenly poked our forks at our plates we realised that there was nothing out there bringing London’s breakfasteurs to account. Something called The London Review of Breakfasts seemed like a good idea that would go quite well.
From presumably humble beginnings you now have 60 listed contributors, all with witty breakfast-related names - how did that come about?
Is it really 60? That’s exciting. I think breakfast is just something that gets people going: when we first started the site we were attracting more new writers than we were new readers. Since then, the site has now developed quite an unusual reviewing style – and that in turn seems to be attracting writers who want to try their hand at it.
Why all the anonymity?
Mainly it’s an excuse to think of puns. There is an apparently infinite supply of potential breakfast-related pseudonyms: the wonderful Grease Witherspoon was a recent one and I think it’s one of the best ever. It works on every level that a pun should or could.
Also it means no café owner knows what we look like, and so can’t make us an especially fine fry-up. We only ever want to experience what Johnny Regular Citizen experiences. And behind the noms de plumes are some quite well-known people: journalists, authors, landscape gardeners. For them, I think it’s a relief to write without the pressure that preconceptions bring.
What’s your ideal breakfast?
Within the realms of the generally buyable it’s a Full English, with the bacon crispy and the fried egg yolk runny. Not too often, mind.
I’d love to go back in time though and have one of the extravagant 19th century breakfasts served before a hunt. They’d serve sirloin steaks, pheasant, chicken, cheese, bread and liqueurs. I’d be useless at hunting though, especially after all that, so I’d need to make sure my time machine was close at hand, to whisk me away when the gentry got irritated by my refusal to get on a horse.
Have you found somewhere to eat it?
We’re working on a book so perhaps by way of research we’ll try and ‘re-enact’ some historic breakfasts, in the manner of those Battle of Hastings re-enactments you sometimes see around the way. I think this will be more fun though.
Can you recommend three great places to go for breakfast in London?
Mess, Hackney: their ‘Mess Breakfast’ is a generous fry-up with all the standards plus fried potatoes. Every last ingredient has been absolutely perfect every time I’ve been there. The diner style booths are the perfect place to relax and read the paper and the reasonable prices go well with those articles about global financial meltdown that are so fashionable at the moment.
The Walpole, Ealing: when there is a café as wonderful as this in an area you can’t help but suspect that builders are over-represented in the local working population such are the numbers streaming through the door every day. I can’t prove anything but is it so far-fetched to imagine that one-man jobs become two-man jobs, and two-man jobs become four-man jobs, because everyone wants a bit of that tasty Walpole bacon and those perfect Walpole eggs?
Blue Brick Café, East Dulwich: technically speaking, Franklins round the corner on Lordship Lane does one of the finest breakfasts in London, but something about Blue Brick wins me over every time. The friendliness and home-made flavours recall a bygone London of starched aprons and knowing your postman. So they get the plug, not Franklin’s.
You and Mabel Syrup took part in Food 2.0 Nom Nom Nom - how was it for you?
It was great fun – really well organised and full of very nice people who knew much more about things like video blogging than we did. I was delighted to win a massive chunk of parmesan in the raffle and try some really nice food. I have to say, although the bowl of sausages we placed amongst all the entries looked just a little bit primitive compared to everything else, I saw a lot of people heading shiftily back to it, several times. Such is the power of grilled pork. We also learned that it’s “scotched egg”, not “Scotch egg”.
What were your three courses and why did you choose them?
We wanted to make a modern three-course breakfast suitable for someone who’s got some time to spend enjoying it. The main event was of course a full English, but prepared with incredibly fine ingredients – sausages from the Ginger Pig butcher, everything else from a farmers’ market. We preceded it with some homemade granola with natural yoghurt and raspberry coulis and finished the whole thing off with some pasteis de nata (Portuguese custard tarts). I suppose it was really just a lot of things we like the taste of.
What did you think of the other participants’ dishes?
Everything tasted splendid – I was in awe of a lot of the people around us. The ‘England meets Italy’ team were on the very next table and for dessert they made a crostata with English berries. It looked a bit like a work of art, only tastier. And Uncook’d, the other brekkie-based teaming of Russell Davies and Richard Moross, did a very funny set of person-specific breakfasts for: minimalists, ravers, millionaires and the middle English.
What did you take with you from the experience?
Apart from a massive chunk of parmesan, I took a set of nice memories and I made a few friends too. That’s a good day.
Do you read other food blogs? If so, can you recommend some we should be reading too?
I naturally try and keep an eye on what other breakfast-related blogs are doing – and Russell Davies’ eggbaconchipsandbeans.com and Good Place for a Cup of Tea and a Think never cease to amuse with their mesmerising, mantra-like dedication. And I check in on a few others like Silverbrow on Food and Krista in London when I have a moment. But I’m probably as interested in London and writing as I am in food, and look at as many different kinds of blog as I can.
Let’s open the great British breakfast debate - where do you get your favourite fryup? We want to hear about the best places for breakfast in your area, so keep those reviews coming!
Photo credit: All Day Breakfast by Martin Deutsch (CC License)
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