Dear Mr. Vernon...

It's been a while since my intrepid search to find the best breakfast around turned up any new savoury evidence. Well, let's be brutally honest, it's been a while since I blogged about absolutely fucking anything, isn't it?

So, let's do a quick Brekkie review. Specifically The Breakfast Club, where I breakfasted last week. On my birthday. 42, since you asked. Getting old.

Anyway, 'The Club' has several locations across the capital, from Battersea to Hoxton as well as Oxford and Brighton, all of which should give you a general idea of where they are coming from and what sort of market they are after. (Possibly not 42 year olds, even if it is their birthday.)

Expensive 'Spoons, expensive countries and a very expensive poo

One of the most insane weekends of my life involved a stag night in Tallinn, eight years ago.

We set off at stupid'o'clock on a Friday morning, on a minibus from Ipswich, started drinking in the Stansted Wetherspoons, and got to the Estonian capital shortly after midday local time, if I recall correctly.

There then followed a marathon afternoon and evening of spiced beer and shots of pepper vodka, followed by weird, tasty, offally food. I suspect I drank more than anybody else. At least eight pints plus half a dozen shots, I'd imagine.

Shooting practice with Spiced Applescotch

You might find it difficult to believe, perhaps even a little upsetting by proxy, but occasionally my blog comes in for some... how can I put this... criticism?!?

It's alright. I can take it.

Sometimes readers disagree with my view - which is their privilege and right - and there will always be irritable brewers and or restauranteurs who decide that I've been overly critical of their restaurant or their beer and get all touchy about it. I guess it's easier to go on the defensive than looking at the reasons why somebody might have found their product to be a bit shit.

Then there are those who, despite my incontravertible loveliness, just don't appreciate my particular writing style, or who are offended by the prevalence of swearing. Fair enough. You go and read summat else then, wankycunt. I'll stay here and make cheap profanity gags.

One common criticism that I think has been entirely resonable and just though, has been about the quality of the photography. I think it's fair to say that often the snapshots taken on a 3 year old phone perhaps don't quite do justice to the food I've prepared.

So... I done got me a new camera.

Capital Breakfasts

You might remember, way, way back at the very dawn of the year, I enjoyed a rather fine breakfast at Duke's Brew and Que and resolved to seek out London's other great breakfasts to see if the Duke could be matched or perhaps even bested...

It went the way of most resolutions made at that time of year, obviously.

Yes, I know. I've let my readers down, I've let myself down, but most of all, I've let breakfast down.

It's the-most-important-meal-of-the-day, so it is, and I've done gone and let it down by utterly failing to stick to my pledge.

Well, until now that is.

Look, I'm not really a morning person. It's a lot of effort getting up and leaving the house before I've even properly woken up. It's hard enough on work days. And I don't even have an appetite until lunchtime usually.

But enough excuses. You've had to wait a long while, so, to celebrate Ben Viveur post No. 150,  here's a double review of the breakfast fayre from two of London's big meaty heavyweights: Simpson's in the Strand and the Hawksmoor Guildhall.

Can silly money buy the best breakfast in London or just the most expensive?

A fucked-up breakfast for a fucked-up Britain

What's Black, Blue and Green?

The flag of Tanzania, perhaps? Nope, that's got a little bit of yellow on it.

A martian that's been savagely beaten?

How about a martian that's been beaten up whilst shrouded in the Tanzanian flag, but has excreted a viscous black-bluey-green bile all over the yellow bits of the flag, thus concealing them?

Is this all sounding completely fucking idiotic? Maybe a bit disturbing? Good.

Actually, it's no more disturbing than a couple of surveys I noticed in this morning's Metro.

Break Fast

One thing my diet of intermittent fasting has taught me - along with the satietal importance of soup, obviously - is the value of breakfast.

Yeah, I know the etymology; the whole thing about breaking ones fast'n'shit, but this is the first time that's really made sense on any kind of practical level.

See, for many years I've generally only partaken of a big cooked breakfast in the morning when either getting up early to travel somewhere (typically having a full English in an Airport Wetherspoons) or while staying in a hotel (on the morning of New Years Eve I had a fairly decent plateful at the Mortimer Arms near Romsey - first time I've had fried bread for many years, which in itself probably isn't a bad thing!)

A bad breakfast is an unpleasant thing, whether you're hungry in the mornings or not. During in the early-Naughties I lived for some time above a pub in Ipswich where a greasy and unpleasant full breakfast was served every morning. Sometimes the fried egg even had cigarette ash in it. After a few months of this I told them I'd go without. None of the other guests seemed to mind much, but then they consisted almost exclusively of builders from Teeside.
 
Anyway, I have been known to fry up a fry-up at home occasionally, but this would be our main meal of the day and probably eaten sometime well North of midday. During normal, everyday, stay-at-home life, I'd never think 'ooh, let's get up early and go out for breakfast!'

But this might be the year where that all changes.

On the mornings following fasting days I'm often ready for something substantial and assuming I stick to the diet for a while, 2013 could well end up being the year I seek out the best breakfast in London.

The delights of Leather Lane

Some people give up stuff for Lent. Alcohol… meat… wanking… whatever.

My Lenten fasting tactics usually involving giving up something but relapsing half-way through, thus showing myself to be a man of admirable intention but with no pretensions to divinity. To try nobly and fail with serenity is the human condition after all.

Either that or I’ll wait until Passiontide or thereabouts, figure out something I just happen to have failed to consume during Lent, and retrospectively decide to give that up, with the finishing line only being a matter of days away.

And that’s not cheating, it’s just being clever.

A week in the life of a Birley king

One of the things I’ll miss most about Canary Wharf when we leave will be Birley's.

In an area where hungry bankers and regulators are decadently spoilt for lunchtime choice Birley still stands out like a bready, meaty beacon in an uber-competitive field of lunch.

Unless you obsess about these sorts of things in the way that I do, you may not be aware that there are actually five, no, six Birley outlets on the Wharf, all with different specialities? That’s one for every day of the week – if you fudge the maths, which we will, obviously - and whereas going to the same place for lunch everyday would normally turn out to be rather tiresome, I always felt that Birley’s range is so diverse that one could quite happily go there every day and not feel cheated at all.

So guess who’s spent this week going to a different Birley shop every day?

The Linguine Experiment?

Like the proverbial physician, my bacon-burnt mouth healed itself, though not without a thirst for breakfasty revenge.

Bacon, Eggs, Sauce of brown; O how may I demand satisfaction of thee?!?

Well, the idea came to me while shopping for ingredients for two seemingly unrelated meals: Let's cook a pasta dish containing only the staple ingredients of an English Breakfast (and pasta, obviously). Yeah, that'll learn 'em.

The more I thought about it, the bigger the challenge seemed. Instinctively linguine (or tagliatelle or spaghetti or whatever) is just crying out for a sauce of onions, basil, oregano, red wine, red peppers and Parmesan - all things I'd have to do without.

Instead, I got to use bacon, sausage, table condiments and, as a radical gamble, pink grapefruit juice. It just felt right, and besides, there are plenty of dishes that call for lemon, lime and occasionally orange, so why not give the black sheep of the citrus family a rare outing?

And the recipe works. Pretty much. Just not as revenge.

It seemed obvious to whack a lightly poached egg on top and let the gooey yolk run into the linguine as a final flourish, so that's what I did.

But egg-poaching is fiendishly hard to get right, with a very poor effort-to-reward ratio, which is why I hardly ever attempt to poach eggs unless absolutely necessary.

Consequently, being all out of practice, I somehow managed to get a load of eggshell in the pan, reached in to remove it and succeeded in not only destroying the egg, but also burning my finger...

They fucking got me again.

Full English Breakfast Linguine

Ingredients - serves any number

Linguine, fresh, as much as you need
Smoked sausage, a couple, chopped into bite-size bits
Smoked Bacon, chopped
Eggs, one per person, to be poached at last minue
Mushrooms, a few per person, chopped
Tomatoes, about one large per person, chopped
Black Pepper

Tomato Ketchup
Brown Sauce
Pink Grapefruit juice
Olive Oil
Butter


Method

Heat the oil and butter in a big sautee pan, and fry the bacon, sausage and mushrooms until lightly brown.

 

It's like two meals in one!

Add the tomatoes and cook for a few more minutes, before turning the heat down, adding black pepper, ketchup, brown sauce and grapefruit juice to taste, then cover and leave to simmer for 20 minutes.

Cook your linguine in a big pot in boiling water until done, then drain, and pour in your sauce, tossing vigourously so that the pasta is covered with the strange, breakfasty concoction.

Finally poach each person an egg. Carefully. And don't overdo them. You need a runny yolk.

Plate up the pasta, put the poached egg on top, prick it with a fork and then maybe sprinkle some black pepper on top of it all.

Be very careful when eating this meal: it combines breakfast and dinner ingredients, so you might get all confused and end up going to bed in the morning or something. In fact, fuck it. Do exactly that. It's a free country'n'shit. See if I care (which I don't, obviously).

Typically you'd expect to serve a sausagey, bacony pasta dish with an elegant Italian Red, but due to the breakfastyness, this would probably go quite well with a glass of fruit juice or a strong black coffee.

Enjoy!