London Breakfast

So let me preface this breakfast with a story. It was my first day going to work at a job based a few metres away from this very cafe, a few weeks after I'd arrived to live in London. Before heading in for my first day, I felt like I could use a coffee, and having only recently relocated from New Zealand I did not realise that, in 2003, a coffee in London was a pale, weak, milky thing. Seeing the name of this establishment, I ventured in for a cappuccino, and it remains in my memory as the worst coffee I've ever had (competing with one from a platform-level outlet on Nunhead station years later, though undoubtedly there are far worse ones in the world). I barely got past the first sip and I vowed never to darken Frank's doors again after the lie perpetrated by their name.

Which brings me to this breakfast, as I had to return if I was to finish my reviews of Fitzrovian breakfasting spots. I chose instead, rarely, tea as an accompaniment, and though I recognise that, even in 2013, tea in Britain is a pale, weak, milky thing (which is far more right for tea than it is for coffee), yet I persist in having mine black (still weak, though). It was very good; I have no problems with it.



In fact, there are many many things to like about Frank's, not least in its unreconstructed caff-ness. It is old school in all the best ways: it looks the part, it has some fantastic unpretentious signage that has clearly not changed in 30 years, and it feels right. There's brusque yet friendly service from behind the counter, and even if their cooked menu sticks to the 'stuff on toast' formula, it's good stuff, and the toast is right for the plate (it's white and it's buttered, and a bit limp). So I get this, which is egg, bacon and sausage on toast. All the ingredients were decent quality, and if the egg wasn't exactly runny (the yolk had mostly hardened), at least there wasn't anything horribly distracting on the plate. I finished it off quickly, I enjoyed it, and my feelings about Frank's have greatly improved since that first, offputting coffee.

Address: Frank's Coffee House, 50-52 Great Titchfield Street, Fitzrovia, London, W1W 7QH.

Continuing my tour of Fitzrovia, I present something a little bit different for breakfast, and not just because for a change it's vegetarian. No, Honey & Co. is a cafe serving Middle Eastern food, rather than your standard fry-ups, which presumably makes it healthier. Their breakfast menu is fairly short, and offers only lahma (bready things with stuff on top) and frittata as warm food.



So this is the herb and feta frittata (or "ijje" as they call it on the menu, which is presumably an alternate spelling for this). I actually asked for the lahma, but no worries, this was pretty nice as well. It comes with a plain yoghurt, as well as a little bowl of nice olives and fresh tomatoes chopped into quarters. There's very little I can add really: a frittata is a straightforward food, an eggy omelette-type thing, and this was a good example of it. Incidentally, I also ordered a fresh orange juice, and it was lovely. So there's that, and yes, worth a visit.

Address: Honey & Co., 25a Warren Street, Fitzrovia, London, W1T 5LZ.

I can't pretend that I get in at the ground floor -- or indeed the loos, in this case -- of many London cafe or restaurant openings; mostly they just blythely pass me by, and I care little. (Okay, I care a bit, but I cannot afford to care too deeply in the more glamorous end of the spectrum, such as Balthazar in Covent Garden, which serves breakfast and looks intriguing, but alas I do not have an expense account.)

However, I heard about Attendant, a new cafe and coffee shop in a converted Victorian public convenience, from a friend a couple of days ago, for indeed it opened a couple of days ago. It's located a block away from my office and it opens for breakfast, which makes it doubly of interest to me and my ongoing Fitzrovian breakfast project. I don't usually post photos of anything aside from the food I ate, but the job they've done in repurposing this bog is pretty cool:



It now resounds with the sounds of a coffee machine, and (thankfully) the smells of freshly made food, which at this stage mostly extends to cakes and biscuits it looks like, though the owner was hanging about and keen to let me know that they're adding new stuff every day. As far as I could tell, the breakfast-themed offering when I was there was a basket of sandwiches, a variation on the BLT, in this case adding avocado and a fried egg.



So yes, there you go. It had been freshly made, but they heated it up a little bit more before serving it to me in its own little basket. Good quality sourdough bread, and fresh ingredients, it was all very tasty and went down almost too easily (given it skewed towards the pricier end of the sandwich scale, being £6). I should also make note of the cappuccino I ordered, which was excellent (but was an added cost on top of the sandwich).

So yes, this is clearly a different league of breakfast joint from the greasy spoons I usually essay on this blog, definitely more akin to Kaffeine (another local barista-focused cafe, which shamefully I haven't yet featured here) or Tapped and Packed (which I have reviewed). But it has enough going for it that it should do well, so if it's the kind of thing you're looking for, I can recommend it.

Address: Attendant, downstairs, 27a Foley Street, Fitzrovia, London, W1W 6DY.

So yes, back to those breakfasts. I'm getting to the last few Fitzrovian hangouts, and this is definitely ranking up there with the better ones. First off, you've got the cafe itself, unprepossessing and tucked away in a little side street off Regent Street. It's a little bigger than most, with seating for about 30 or so, I'd imagine. It also has several bustling and busy wait staff greeting customers, showing them to tables, getting menus, delivering food, all rushing about hither and yon, also quite surprising in this type of place. Rare is the greasy spoon I've been to that's even had one waitress, let alone an army of them as this place does.



The food and drinks come quickly then, as you'd expect, but the good thing is that the quality is right up there with the best of greasy spoon fare. Toast is buttered and white as per your standard full English. Baked beans are a tightly contained slick at the edge of the plate, crowded out by other ingredients. As this is the "big breakfast" (£5.50 including tea/coffee) there are two eggs and two rashers of bacon. Fried eggs are cooked perfectly to form, like a Platonic ideal of fried eggs. A crispy hash brown and those mushrooms are also a 'big' breakfast extra, and I for one am glad for them. The mushrooms are top quality, cooked just right, just how they should be. And the sausage is excellent and tasty, so I leave it for last.

In short, I can heartily recommend this place for your dietarily-unwise breakfast food needs. They do have a vegetarian breakfast listed for around £3.50 (not include gratis tea/coffee, I don't think), but today I was feeling like a sausage.

Address: Little Portland Cafe, 15 Little Portland Street, Fitzrovia, London, W1W 8BW.

So, new year (happy one, etc) new breakfasts. Or, well, a return to Fitzrovia, because I still have a few places to get to before I'm done with it. For my first breakfast (and post) of this year, you get one that I've not exactly been inspired to write excessively about, but hey it was okay.



First of all, there wasn't a great choice on the breakfast menu, mostly of the takeaway variety, but they had one cooked breakfast listed so I went for that. It's not really "full" English, because there's no potato product (or tomato, though I will always forgive a tomato for not being there), but it was pretty decent. The baked beans were a bit disappointing (perhaps I am too addicted to Heinz), but the bread for mopping them up was excellent, and the bacon and sausage were perfectly fine. Egg had a runny centre that the toast helped with and all in all I was pleased. Came to £5 including a tea or coffee.

Address: Masters Sandwich Bar, 53 Great Portland Street, Fitzrovia, London, W1W 7LG.

So let's get back to it then.



Here we have a classic line-up for your full English greasy spoon breakfast, presented in classic caff format to a good range of people (if the clientele include builders I always think that's a sign of a place offering a good breakfast at good value).

You can make the FE with the highest possible quality ingredients and then charge £10+ for it, but that seems to be missing the point of a really good FE. It's to take basic simple cheap ingredients and make them tasty. Sure, I could complain that the eggs could have had a richer coloured yolk, or gosh, I don't know, that they could have made their own hash browns, but I'd probably have been a little disappointed if they had because I've come to rely on that familiar taste of the HBs coming from a packet or a big catering-size bag or however they're packaged.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that this, for your £5 including coffee or tea, was a good breakfast. All the elements of the non-veggie FE were there (potato tick, fried eggs tick, Heinz baked beans tick, mushrooms tick, decent meat tick), lacking only perhaps a grilled tomato, and they were all well executed. The mushrooms were perfectly fine (too often they are poorly cooked or entirely tasteless), the baked beans were correct (not some off-brand nonsense), the eggs could perhaps have been a little more cooked (but I'm splitting hairs here), and the meat was good, especially that sausage. Really nice sausage. Oh and the bread was thick yet pliable, and if I could have used a bit more that's just because I scoffed it so quickly.

So yes, top breakfast. I can recommend this place.

Address: Nonno Lino Italiano, 45 Goodge Street, Fitzrovia, London, W1T 1TB.

Babble Jar bar and diner used to be a fish restaurant, which suffered from being on the high street and therefore ignored by the fine diners of Stoke Newington Church Street. Now it's a bar-diner with a short food menu of breakfast, sandwiches, salads and an extensive cocktail list, presumably hoping to capture the yummy parents of N16 by day and the hipsters of Dalston by night.


(Photo from their website)

My partner had the veggie breakfast, comprising portobello mushroom filled with baked beans, three (3!) hash browns, poached eggs, half a grilled tomato, veggie sausage, roasted pepper, and toast for £6.95.



He observed that the eggs were both a little too hard (yoke) and a bit too soft (white) and whilst the roast pepper was an interesting addition, it was a little too sweet for (a savoury) breakfast. He liked the mushrooms, beans, hash brown and sausage.

I had the babble breakfast (£7.50), which was an odd mixture - poached eggs on toast with mozzarella, balsamic vinegar, rocket, avocado and soft cheese:- it was a strange but not unpleasant combination. The main problem was that the bar seemed to have a literal open door policy, creating not only a cold draught but also letting in the noise and pollution of the A10. So my meal went cold pretty quickly and there's nothing more depressing than a cold poached egg.



Staff were very friendly, the sofas were squashy, the coffee (an additional £2.20) was pretty good, but they need to, as Larry Grayson used to exclaim, shut that door.

London isn't Mexico, and anyone with an interest in Mexican food who has tried to take London up on that country's cuisine has reliably been disappointed over the years. Still, it hasn't stopped people from trying, and there's now a fairly reliable range of burrito and taco bars around this town which are decent (in a Mexico via West Coast USA but with added local idiosyncrasies sort of way). Wahaca was one of the early restaurants to try to do things a bit better than the ole ole big hats and bad margaritas of the previous naff theme Mexicans (which sadly still exist: avoid anywhere with a comedy name or 'wacky' colours).

So anyway, that Wahaca has expanded somewhat, and now has a branch in Fitzrovia where they open for breakfast (with this here breakfast menu). I thought I'd try it out. After all, I've rather forced myself with this Fitzrovia project.



I went for the first thing on the list, the huevos rancheros (£6 without extras like avocado or bacon/chorizo), making this vegetarian! I am given to understand that cheese and sour cream are non canon for this kind of thing, but the corn tortillas are the base, with the eggs and salsa and frijoles (beans) piled on top. There's an option for either roasted tomato red salsa or green tomatillo salsa, and as apparently the latter is very spicy, I went for red. It was still pretty spicy, but I thought the dish had a good balance, and was pretty good all told. Nice too, to have a place with a good range of options for breakfast.

Address: Wahaca, 19-23 Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia, London, W1T 1RL.

It's my birthday today, so I thought some good old-fashioned unhealthy fry-up action was in order to see me through to drinks tonight.

There are, it turns out, two Caffe Macchiatos in Fitzrovia. I have no idea if they're related. They look different from outside, so I assume not. However, the other one is on Cleveland Street, and I've been there already.



They do, however, share the habit of cutting open the sausage for maximum display effect. Aside from that -- and the decidedly non-canon move of omitting any potato product -- this breakfast was alright in all the most unhealthy ways. The sausage was decent, the bacon crisped up, and the egg had a firmness of white combined with runniness of yolk that almost confused me, though it was nice. Tomatoes were a bit pointless (but you know how I feel about those anyway), not grilled enough and sliced rather than halved; at least they were fresh tomatoes. Toast was sufficiently soft to mop up the sea of baked bean juices, so I give this breakfast a tick.

Address: Caffe Macchiato, 15 Eastcastle Street, Fitzrovia, London, W1T 3AY.

Back safely ensconced in Fitzrovia fry-up territory, I pop into Matteo's, being one I hadn't yet made it into in the short walk from Goodge Street station to my work.

It is, first of all, a proper old-school Italian-run caff, with the kind of unretouched and unrefurbished look and decor that befits this kind of joint. Maybe this kind of unselfaware style has got hipster cred, or maybe it flies under most people's radar, I don't even know how to judge it in fashion terms; it's just right, though, for a greasy spoon.

They have a list of set breakfast options, with varying ingredients (the vegetarian one is the same kind of aubergine and cheese affair I had a few doors down the road at Perugino Coffee House). I spy one with hash browns and stupidly fail to note that it does not list baked beans, assuming that all breakfasts of this type would have them.



But for all that, for all that surprise and slight disappointment that it lacked baked beans, it was still all basically very decent. A fiver for this, toast and a coffee or tea seems almost expensive compared to some caffs of this type, but it's a good investment. The bacon is fine, and the hash browns are properly crisped-up without beeing overly oily. The egg may be broken in a rather unattractive way, but it tastes fine and still has the runniness to be mopped up by the bread, without being too thin and watery a yolk. The highlight, though, is the sausage, which is excellent quality. I stand by that sausage. It was a good sausage.

Address: Matteo's Sandwich Bar, 32 Tottenham Street, Fitzrovia, London, W1T 4RL.