Big Breakfast of the Week 14: A big egg for breakfast!

It's ages since we have had a big breakfast post, not that we have stopped having them just we have been too busy doing other things to post about them.  Latterly we have been in South America, staying at three separate hotels, but none of them did a proper cooked breakfast.  They all managed scrambled egg and a couple could do a fresh omelette (oddly Triple P doesn't enjoy omelettes very much) but processed ham in hot water does not make a suitable accompaniment to eggs we think.

Anyway, returning from Colombia at the weekend we were sorely in need of some proper tea (not the horrible fruit and flower types on offer - which are for girls) and a decent breakfast.  We were in Waitrose on Monday and noticed that they had some of their goose eggs on sale at half price.  This, we thought, was a great opportunity as, frankly, £6.99 for one egg is a bit pricey.

Hen's egg compared to a goose egg

We weren't sure if you could fry one, as the Easter egg-type box it came in only mentioned scrambled eggs, but thought if cooked slowly enough it would be fine. So we put a little olive oil in our Le Creuset frying pan and gave the egg  good crack.  It broke easily, although the shell is tougher than a hen's egg shell; as you would expect from something a lot larger.  A goose egg is, apparently, equivalent to two and a half normal eggs.

It perfectly filled the pan and we cooked it over a medium heat for about five minutes.  We had it with sausages, grilled tomato, toast, baked beans, wholegrain mustard and HP sauce.  The egg was deliciously creamy and we would certainly get one again - but not at full price given you can get six normal eggs for around £2.  Goose eggs are only in season from February until early June so we may have to wait a year!

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Big Breakfast of the Week 13: The Gossips Cafe, Yarmouth

We haven't had a Big Breakfast for a while and at present we are reading a novel which features Algernon Charles Swinburne, who was brought up on the Isle of Wight and is buried there (in Bonchurch).  We are also preparing a post on the artist George Apperley who was also from the Isle of Wight so why not go back to a breakfast that we had there one sunny morning in August, we thought?

It is to West Wight we go, rather than Bonchurch, which is on the eastern end, to the pretty port town of Yarmouth.  Triple P used to visit Yarmouth regularly on his uncle's boat when he was small and, frankly it has changed very little over the years.

Yarmouth Pier from the cafe

The Gossips Cafe has a great location at the foot of Yarmouth Pier and, in our corner table we could see along the pier one way and the other way across to the ferry terminal at the boats coming over to the island from Lymington.

Yarmouth Castle and the ferry from the cafe

The cafe has a good choice for breakfast with everything from toast and marmalade for £1.70, through a hot bacon baguette (£3.80) to the full English breakfast which is what, of course, Triple P took.  This consists of a fried egg, two rashers of bacon, a jumbo sausage, mushrooms and tomato.  Also included in the £7.30 price is an orange juice, two slices of toast, marmalade and a pot of tea.  There are lots of optional extras too, so we added baked beans for 60p. 

Although the cafe was pretty busy when we went there, service was quite quick although there was one mistake made on our order which was quickly rectified.  The food quality was fair although, inevitably, the sausage was poor quality.  The difference in price between poor and good quality sausages is fairly small and yet, almost always, these cafes almost always serve  inferior sausages whereas their bacon was good quality.

Inside the cafe is bright and clean and decorated in the tourist friendly nautical style.  All in all a very pleasant place to have breakfast, given the excellent views, the food was acceptable so overall we can happily give it 7/10.

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Big Breakfast of the Week 12: Eegon's of Cowes

Triple P's breakfast of choice at Eegons: the All Day Breakfast for £5.50

Very much a feature of Cowes Week for many is a pre-race breakfast at Eegon's Cafe in Cowes High Street.  This is a classic English cafe (pronounced "caff" in this instance) and you are just as likely to be sharing it with the hard working chaps from the Isle of Wight street cleansing department (they start work at 2.00am quite often during Cowes Week) or lifeboatmen (especially as the new RNLI station will be virtually next door) as yachties.

Triple P usually takes the £5.50 All Day Breakfast which consists of two eggs, two rashers of bacon, two sausages, fried bread, baked beans or tomatoes and toast.  There is also (for girls, presumably) a half breakfast for £4.50 which only has one sausage, one rasher of bacon and one egg.

The new Regatta Platta

The range of cooked breakfasts is simply marvellous although woe betide you if you try to ask for any changes to the menu.  Asking for scrambled, rather than fried eggs, for example will be met with a polite refusal.  A new offering this year is the Regatta Platta: a sausage, a rasher of excellent bacon, fried bread, toast, mushrooms, baked beans (or tomatoes) and saute potatoes plus a drink all for £5.

Proprietor Rod Ainge is a Cowes fixture, heavily involved with the commercial life of the town so you are just as likely to eavesdrop on unofficial meetings between council officials and representatives of the local retailers as discussions about sailing.

Breakfast Bonanza

The biggest challenge used to be the enormous Breakfast Bonanza, a plateful so vast you actually got a certificate if you finished it (Triple P has one, of course).  Two eggs, two sausages, two rashers of bacon, mushrooms beans or tomatoes, hash browns, black pudding, fried bread and toast for £7.50.  This year the new Steakfast looks even more of a challenge!  We haven't tried the latter yet.

This year thay have also introduced a loyalty card where, if you amass ten stanps you get a £5 voucher.  this, of course, encourages you to visit even more than you should.

Breakfast at Eeegons is not perfect, the sausages (compared with the bacon and eggs, say) are low quality and the sauces are generic catering sachets rather than HP or Heinz but even so for the sheer choice and value it gets 9/10

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Big Breakfast of the Week 11: Brasserie Roux at the Sofitel St James

The Sofitel St James is a convenient location for Triple P: close to the Canadian and South African High Commissions, the Institute of Directors, Quebec Government House, the Commonwealth Secretariat and other places where Agent Triple P can be regularly found.  So it is quite often that Triple P finds himself there for breakfast.  Now breakfast at a boutique five star hotel like this should be a pleasurable experience but, we have to say, that we have been regularly disappointed at the Sofitel.

The interior designed by Pierre Yves-Rochon

Breakfast is either a buffet or, as Triple P prefers, a la carte.  The problem is the indifferent service from grumpy Eastern European waiters.  Eastern European women have been a great boost to the restaurant trade in the UK: friendly, nice looking and efficient.  Their male equivalents. however, seem to resent the fact that they aren't making a packet as plumbers or carpenters.  The staff in the Brasserie Roux consistently let down what could otherwise be a good restaurant.

 

The red grapefruit juice which Triple P requested was nice and cold, although perhaps a little on the small side.  This didn't matter as they offered us a refill (although whether we would have had to pay for that wasn't clear).  The teas, served in one of those trendy iron teapots, was curious as, on opening the lid, Triple P found neither a tea bag nor leaves.   This meant that there was no way of adjusting the strength of the brew.  As for the breakfast itself at least this time they got TripleP's order correct.  In the past they have omitted items because, like increasing numbers of waiters and waitresses in London, they don't write orders down.

The breakfast itself was not as hot as it should have been although the sausage was truly excellent.  It did come with some very good wholewheat toast.  The all inclusive price was £23.50 which is on the high side for London but did include drinks and toast so that makes it rather better value than it first appears.  An automatic 12.5% service charge was included which given the service was offhand (perhaps they are just trying to be Parisian) was a bit much.

So it loses marks for the poor quality tea, the lukewarm eggs, the rather unattractive dining room and the service.

All in all a disappointing 5/10.

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Big Breakfast of the Week 10: Le Beaulieu Restaurant, Metropole Hotel Hanoi

It looks like Agent Triple P is going to be off on his travels again later this month so it's probably time for a another foreign big breakfast review.

Le Beaulieu in the Metropole Hotel in Hanoi is a restaurant with a long heritage. The restaurant has been in its current location ever since the hotel opened in 1901. The hotel has recently been sensitively renovated keeping all of its colonial style whilst bringing the facilities up to a level that Triple P has rarely seen elsewhere.

Outside the restaurant is a pavement cafe: very French!

Normally we don't like hotel restaurants that have to serve breakfast lunch and dinner but Le Beaulieu doesn't have the canteen elements of many modern multi-purpose hotel restaurants and for breakfast the setting is exquisite with a cool and relaxing atmosphere. Less formal breakfast is available in the nearby L'Orangerie.

 

As usual, Agent Triple P likes to start breakfast with tea and grapefruit juice. This always throws waiters around the world who expect everyone to have coffee and orange juice, annoyingly! The grapefruit juice was, unusually, white but none the worse for that. The tea was nicely served but suffered from French style (UHT we suspect) milk.

Our companion's breakfast illustrates how she stays so slim and gorgeous!  The grapefruit segements were massive!  The usual selection of Asian, continental and cooked breakfasts were available.  The selection was quite good without being exceptional.  The sausages were slightly unusual in taste but were excellent.  The bacon was streaky but not cooked into carbonised sticks like most international hotels.  This is sort of the worst of both worlds.  Streaky bacon in the UK is largely used for covering a turkey to prevent it burning.  No self respecting English person would actually eat it!  Back bacon is proper bacon which is cooked so that it is still soft not crispy.   The baked beans didn't have that weird spicy taste you often get in Asia and the tomatoes, mushrooms and hash browns were just perfect.

 

Eggs were cooked fresh by a helpful young lady and were particularly good.  All in all one of the nicer hotel restaurants Agent Triple P has had breakfast in of late. A pretty good selection and excellent service let down by the strange milk and dubious bacon.

Still, gets a good 7/10

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Big Breakfast of the Week 9: The Lemon Garden Cafe, Shangri-La Hotel Kuala Lumpur

Back to Asia for this week's big breakfast and the Lemon Garden Cafe in the Shangri-La hotel, Kuala Lumpur.  Agent Triple P has travelled to KL, as British ex-pats irritatingly call it, probably more often than any other Asian city.  It was a senior executive of a very big British bank with Asian roots (er...) who once said to Triple P that British men move to Asia for one of three reasons: women problems, drink problems or money problems!  Certainly every time we go to Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Manila, or Jakarta we run into a certain type of forty-something man, usually with a mustache, who drinks too much whisky at the ambassador's reception and has a twenty year old local girlfriend who is spending all his money.  She wants to get married so she can live in England and then, of course, he will lose half his money anyway.  Oddly, (or maybe not) they often seem to work for tobacco companies as Asia is their only expanding market.  So, they'll be dead by the time they're fifty anyway, what with the drinking, the cigarettes and the twenty year old girlfriend.  Someone from the British Embassy in Bangkok once told me of the alarming number of dead businessmen they have to deal with who have literally been fucked to death by a local teenage prostitute and they have a selection of stories they have to use for the wife and family.

Anyway, all of this was prompted by the fact that we first met one of these ghastly ex-pats the first time we visited Kuala Lumpur about ten years ago.  We were staying in the Mandarin Oriental, which is still our favourite hotel in the city.  The Shangri-La was not nearly as good as the Mandarin.  Still, we had quite a good view of the Petronas twin towers (formerly the tallest building in the world and still much more attractive than number 1).

The Lemon Garden Cafe is one of those big canteen style breakfast areas that also serves as the cheap, holidaymakers, lunch and dinner venue.  The selection was as expected with a mix of western and Asian food.  The choice for a cooked breakfast was not brilliant, we have to say, but we had the (rather chewy) beef bacon, some  chicken sausages (not bad) and the usual strange local version of baked beans. The hash browns were a bit dry but they did have mustard.  What cheered up the whole experience were some really pretty girls working there.  In fact the welcome and friendliness of service was excellent.

So it scores 5/10 but at least one point was for the staff.

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Big Breakfast of the Week 8: Giraffe

Giraffe is a large cafe/restaurant built underneath the Festival Hall on the South Bank of the Thames in London.  Only a few minutes from Waterloo Station, Triple P sometimes stops there if he is early for a meeting over the river.  Indeed, sometimes we have meetings there as it is convenient for anyone coming into Waterloo.

Absolutely packed in the evenings (especially in the summer when you can sit outside) at breakfast time it is nice and quiet.

Triple P has the full brunch plate for a not too unreasonable £7.75.  Tea is 1.95 a cup and whilst it is annoying not having a pot we have never found any problem getting  another cup delivered quickly as service is very good in the morning due to the lack of customers.

Originally set up in Hampstead in 1998 Giraffe is still largely owned by the individuals who founded it and now has forty branches in the UK with another five at UK airports.  Triple P has never been there for any other meal than breakfast so has no idea what the rest of their food is like.

The breakfast is very good, however.   A good Cumberland sausage, thick lean bacon, crisp fried potatoes (particularly good), proper Heinz baked beans and two eggs which you can have fried or scrambled.  The toast is very good too. 

Definitely one of the better breakfasts we have regularly, so it gets 7/10.

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Big Breakfast of the Week 7: Oscar Restaurant at the Charlotte Street Hotel

The Charlotte Street Hotel is a good place for a breakfast meeting if you need to be the Tottenham Court Road end of Oxford Street.  It's also a good place for afternoon tea and the bar is always busy.  Agent Triple P used to go there regularly as his office used to be very nearby, so it was nice to be back there again the other week.

Although the building is old it didn't open as a hotel until 2000 and is a small boutique five star establishment with just 52 rooms.  It was designed by Kit Kemp and features work by contemporary British artists.

Oscars Restaurant

We have to say that although we like the atmosphere of the place the service in the restaurant and bar is rather average.  The cooked breakfast at £20.00 is supposed to consist of eggs, a Cumberland sausage, sweet cured bacon, plum tomoatoes, grilled field mushrooms, black pudding and bubble and squeak.  Included in the price are freshly squeezed juices, toast and preserves and tea or coffee, which is not a bad price for a West End hotel.

However, we found our breakfast tasty but on the small side.  One egg, one mushroom and no sign of the black pudding.  Our companion passed on black pudding and we suspect they got confused.  You are a five star hotel you shoudln't get these things wrong.  We asked for baked beans instead of bubble and squeak (a disgustuing mixture of fried cabbage and potoes, for our foreign readers) and were charged an eye watering £4.00 for two tablespoons of beans.  Worse than that, and we have to reiterate that it was tasty, was that the tea was lukewarm by the time it arrived which rather wrecked the fact that it was proper leaf tea.

So all in all good potential but let down by the service (as ever) so we can only give it 6/10.

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