Entertaining Elliot at the Cow

January 12th.

It was time to get back into action. It was the Sunday morning after the first full working week of 2014. The people of Brighton were recovering, it would seem. The streets surrounding Seven Dials were largely deserted. The roads were relatively quiet. The Cow was mainly empty, but for Elliot Tume and a staff member who would welcome an excuse to fire the coffee machine up.

It felt apt that I would be seeing my first breakfast of the new year with one of my newest acquaintances, in a venue where another one, Joe, was working as chef. It was all very exciting. The Cow was a venue I'd walked past several times down Dyke Road towards Churchill Square and all of those wonderful, wonderful shops. It had caught the eye, and my associates I had spoken to about it were complimentary in their reporting. The Cow was the place to start 2014's fastbreaking. It felt right.

Elliot had not read any of my blog previously, but said that he expected the experience to be "very The Trip esque." I am sadly yet to watch any full episodes of that programme, but I fully expect it to be as enjoyable as eating a big cooked breakfast. I decided to try to work my best 'dishevelled Steve Coogan' look though, in an attempt to live up to Elliot's expectation.

Elliot is a very friendly chap who I met last year through mutual friends in The Knights Project; an adept local folk group with an especially adept accordion player. The band is comprised of lovely people, and unsurprisingly Elliot fits that mould also. He has only been living in Brighton for a relatively short while, having finished studying film at uni. He quickly fell into that trap that many of us do; when you spend years fully occupied with studying or working on something you love it is very easy to turn your back on it once you have finished. For Elliot, his film-watching took a back seat to other things, and I too successfully managed to neglect reading and writing for some time after finishing my BA and MA respectively. It is a new year though, and a time for us all to sit down and think, hey man, this time round I'm going to focus and concentrate on doing the things I love doing, and not faff around so much, with more sleep and better eating so that I'm not so drained when I get back from work. As a man who works up in London (although I'm not sure you can really label it as work if there's an X-Box in the office), Elliot understands the devastating effect that the long-distance commute can have on one's evening life.

The new year is also a time for changes, not just cultivation. This is something that Elliot seems to be quite good at, as he admits to being prone to determined acts of life-changing character, for their own sake rather than for any loftier motive. It was through this propensity that he became a vegetarian, and it was very interesting to chat to a fellow vegetarian with motives slightly different from my own. There are many good arguments for becoming vegetarian. Those most often cited are the moral argument and the health argument, (here is a paper that might be interesting, and it also includes a feminist argument as well) but I would like to quickly mention two other arguments that I have noticed apply since becoming vegetarian myself. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly in this age of austerity, food is much cheaper when you're not buying meat. Secondly, and perhaps more pleasantly, washing-up is largely easier when you don't have to contend with the greasy, fatty oozings of meat in pans and on grills. When it comes to purchasing a cooked breakfast, this second point isn't so important, but every now and then point number one can make a difference.

And so, the breakfast:

Vegetarian Breakfast

2 fried eggs, beans, veggie sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes with toast

Vegetarian Breakfast - £7.95

I was initially worried about writing about the food at the Cow, due to the fact that the chef of said food may well read what I have to say. That is why I have outsourced the writing of this portion of the blog to my good friend Santiago. Santiago likes eating quite a lot, and has happily agreed to step in to the firing line whenever my opinion might be compromised. It is fortunate that Santiago has exactly the same political leanings as me as far as breakfasts are concerned, and he is not afraid to speak his mind. Without further ado, I shall pass control of the keyboard over to mi amigo, Santiago.

¡Hola! It is a pleasure to play a part in my friend's blog, which I have enjoyed reading quite a bit since I have met him. In Spain, where I used to live, we did not have so many breakfast like these, but I have grown to love them so much whilst living here in Brighton, almost as much as I love Guinness!

The breakfast looked good to me, a bit like Fernando Torres. I was impressed with the layout, and with the separate pot for the beans. I could eat it a little like tapas! But, I wondered, will it do the job like Fernando Torres at Liverpool, or will it be more like Fernando Torres at Chelsea?

Veg for veg's sake

The mushroom was the first thing I sampled and it was good! It was mucho juicy, like some kind of super barbeque mushroom. Jajaja! There was a lot of juiciness all across the plate really, in particularly with the baked beans (muy rico!) and the tomatoes, which had a very pleasing texture and would have worked well in last year's Tomatina which me and my friend Cockleberry went to. Crazy!

As well as being very juicy and moist, the breakfast was seasoned well, with lots of exciting peppery flavours coming through. The tomatoes shared this with the potatoes which were soft, and the sausages, which were quite meaty both in texture and taste. They were surprisingly stodgy for a vegetarian sausage, and though I haven't had many of these since moving here, they were unlike any I had before in a English cafe. Yum! The eggs too were expertly seasoned, taking the tastes which were crafted well, with soft yet solid white and nice thick flowing yolk, and raising them to a new level of tasty.

The toast was a good slice of baker's white bread, with butter on for me. It was a friendly texture. The one thing I think that would make better the dish is if there was something crunchier involved perhaps, as a lot of the food was soft and juicy. I love breakfasts like I love Spanish women, soft and juicy, but every now and then you want something like a Spanish man, like Fernando Torres when he shaved his head, and that is a bit of crunch. Overall it was great and tasty, and I would be happy to go there for breakfast again, or maybe go in the evening and have a Guinness. Moo!

Thus ends Santiago's breakfast blog debut, substituted in the 85th minute after being brought on at half-time. That's probably happened to Fernando Torres at Chelsea at some point. One thing that Santiago didn't mention was the feel of the venue. The Cow is a bar rather than a cafe, yet one of its less obvious strengths is the amount of light that comes in, courtesy of large windows at the front of house (just look at that photo at the top). This gives it a similarly homely feel to most eateries, and really added to the energising effect of the breakfast we ate. It was a good way to start the day, and definitely a good way to start the year's fastbreaking.

Function: warming and energising - 4/5
Adherence to canon: Yes
Taste: only to be improved with textural variety 4/5
Value: quite a few coins but worth it - 3/5
Presentation: good for a "tapas" approach 5/5
Venue: - light and airy unlike most bars 4/5


Overall: no need to find an udder place to go at Seven Dials - 4/5

2013 in review

10th January.

Well, it hasn't quite been a full year since I began this breakfast blog, but this seems like an apt place to pause, take stock, and look forward to the breakfasts that 2014 will bring.

I have received a surprising amount of feedback about this blog, which is very exciting. Thanks to those of you who have followed my artery-clogging adventure throughout the last year and have said nice things about it. Also thank-you to everyone who agreed to join me for breakfast and put up with my scribblings whilst trying to engage me in polite conversation. You were all very lovely and great to share the breakfasts with.

I have decided to order the venues I have visited and their cooked breakfasts in a crude league table, as a point of comparison. At some point when I've more time I'll go back and order this list more thoroughly. As it is, the venues with matching scores are ordered randomly:


Montpelier Cafe - 4.5/5
Iydea - 4/5
Mange Tout - 4/5
Seven Bees - 4/5
Bill's - 4/5
Cafe Motu - 4/5
Soup-Urb - 4/5
Mad Hatter - 4/5
Wai Kika Moo Kau - 4/5
Langelees - 4/5
Kemp Town Bistro - 3.5/5
Fiveways Deli - 3.5/5
Tutti Frutti (I don't think this exists now!) - 3.5/5
Galleria - 3/5
Billie's Cafe - 3/5
Inside Out - 3/5
Kensingtons - 3/5
Infinity Foods Cafe - 2/5
Post and Telegraph - 2/5
Rock Ola - 2/5
Wild Cherry - 2/5
Dumb Waiter - 2/5
Spinelli - 2/5
Cosy Cottage - 2/5


There's a lot of good stuff out there, but more excitingly there's a heck of a lot more stuff that I have yet to sample. I think I will long run out of friends before I run out of places to visit, and should probably start drafting up an ad for Gumtree which I can use to find more breakfast companions.

"WANTED: Companion for one cooked breakfast, willing to say things whilst I go about scribbling and/or eating in contemplation. Being able to make nice suggestions/tell interesting life stories preferable but not essential. Meat eaters welcome. Just about."

As well as the regular breakfasting that this blog documents, I have another project in the pipeline for 2014. You may well be aware that I am keen fan of the sport known in most places as football. You may also be aware that this year is a World Cup year, and for a period of three weeks 32 nations will do battle across the pitches of Brazil attempting to be crowned champions of the world. During this time, I aim to make those 32 nations do battle across my breakfast table, and see which has the best cooked breakfast. Early favourites include Mexico and Ghana, and I am very excited to find out what I would be eating if I hailed from Bosnia-Herzegovina or Iran for example. Sadly Scotland will not be participating. If they were, they'd stand a good chance of getting out of the group stages. At Xmas time my Dad prepared a pretty epic Scottish dish which would have put him in pole position for the golden spoon award.

The Derek Xmas Special

Anyhow, I shall be hopefully forging ahead into the new year with another cooked breakfast this Sunday. Fingers crossed. If you'd like to join me some time, and/or if you know of anywhere that I should pay a visit to, just let me know! Happy fastbreaking for 2014 one and all.

Coming up to Christmas with Clare at Soup-Urb

December 22nd.

Whoops. It happened again. I stopped going out for breakfasts. The main contributory factor for this was NaNoWriMo; this year I had decided to make a proper fist of writing 50,000 words of political and environmental polemic, thinly disguised as a fantasy novel about steampunk dinosaur pirates, and this meant that there wasn't much time for dilly-dallying around eating tasty food and expending precious words on it. Then, once November had been and gone, I wanted a bit of a break from writing. This was coupled with football training being later on Saturdays, and then matches on Sundays being very tiring. All in all, there was neither the time nor the inclination to go breakfasting.

And then Christmas began to come along. This meant a surprise seasonal break in the football playing, along with some time-off of work which left much more space for writing in the distance. The magical mixture of a free Sunday and space for writing meant that it was time to hit the breakfast trail once more!

Clare Silver was my breakfast companion, and it was good to finally arrange a time that we were both free to fastbreak. She seems to have one of the most hectic schedules of all of my friends, being an active member in at least two strong friendship groups in Brighton, as well as maintaining incredibly strong ties with her family who live in Horsham. She went to 9 weddings this past year. Only a registrar will have been to more. I don't know where she gets the energy to do all of this butterflying around, but she always does it with a smile on her face and kindness in her heart.

She is also a seriously talented individual, a true master of craftwork. In her time she has created many, many things that people would eagerly spend vast quantities of money on were they to come across them in shops. Scarves, blankets, dresses (Team Silver played a major part in the creation of the bridesmaids' dresses at the Sykes-Williams wedding earlier in the year), furniture coverings, and she discussed with me her plans to maybe make a corduroy pinafore at some point in the future. I myself am the proud owner of a lovely blue and white striped apron with my initials on. You can't buy class like that.

We made our way to Soup-Urb on Trafalgar Street, a place that bills itself as serving up "urban food". I'm not entirely sure what urban food is supposed to be. I shall attempt to dissect this term later on in the review. The venue had a comforting feel though, even if this tagline was a little bamboozling. The furniture was rustic and artisan, and the menu was cutely bound together with an elastic band. Bob Marley was playing softly in the background, gaining the approval of both myself and Clare, who thought that he was good background music. Not because he should always be played quietly and out of the way, but because the mellow easy-going nature of his songs is welcoming and non-intrusive. Ever since she went to visit one of her best friends in Tanzania, she has developed a keen taste for reggae, although in general Tuff Gong is not one of her favourites. It's remarkable that I haven't heard reggae playing in more of these venues to be honest, considering how well a lot of the genre ticks the same boxes as the cooked breakfast. Both seem, to me in any case, all about recognising the value in taking it easy.

And so, the breakfast:

Full English Breakfast

--

Full English Breakfast - £8.50

"Live for others and you will live again" - Bob Marley

It's always a bit of a risk ordering a meal from a menu when it doesn't tell you what's in it. When me and Clare were in halls of residence at Exeter University, every now and then an interesting item would appear on the dinner time menu called Jackpot Casserole. This was a bit of a strange dish, and to this day I'm not any of us were ever sure what it comprised of, apart from celery being the majority stakeholder in the dish. It felt like a similar risk here at Soup-Urb. Was I going to be on the receiving end of celery mounted on a piece of fried bread?

Fortunately this was not the case. The Full English Breakfast comprised of the following; toast (choice of white or granary bread), eggs (choice of poached, scrambled, or fried), spinach, mushrooms, potatoes, tomato, and halloumi. It didn't adhere to the canon and so looked as though it would be a bit dry, but it was certainly much better than anything involving celery.

The one thing that was most striking about the breakfast at Soup-Urb was how perfectly all of the separate components were cooked. Cooked breakfasts usually contain several items that have very different optimum cooking times, and so the act of co-ordinating them can be a fine art, particularly with the more complex breakfasts. The Soup-Urb breakfast contains pretty much the full spectrum of cooking times in it, from the delicate spinach through to the hardy potatoes, though foregoing the inclusion of any item that can just be bunged in an oven for a while whilst attending to other things. To get all of the items spot on is an impressive feat.

To hammer this point home, I have eaten there twice now (partly because I forgot to photograph my food there the first time...) and have tried both the scrambled and poached eggs. Both require very different approaches and amounts of time in preparation, and both yielded superb results, being solid, moist, fluffy, and explosive when required, and keeping these qualities in harmonious balance.

None of the items seemed to have any extra extravagant flavourings added to them, letting the original ingredients speak for themselves. It is a testament to good cooking and ingredients that a component of a dish can taste so delicious in isolation.

The problem was, inevitably, that there were no baked beans. One could argue that beans would ruin the overall aesthetic of the food; the "urban food" aesthetic. I have been in discussion with several people since the breakfast, and the jury is still out as to what the term means. A swift google search shows that it is likely that Soup-Urb have coined the term themselves. To me (and others), "urban food" suggests food for the urbanite, for the individual in an urban environment. Such an individual is likely to be very busy, as is the way with urban environments, and so is in need of food quickly. The urban individual is also cultured, and so wants something a little classy, but also reliable. We're either talking about trendy chain outlets like Pret a Manger or Delice de France, or street food that's a bit more flashy. Sexed up street food, or street food for the middle class. Urban food. I think it's possible to create baked beans to fit this model, and the extra vibrancy and moisture would have gone a long way to securing Soup-Urb's position near the top of the table.

Like reggae, the realm of breakfast can also be a place for social commentary. The cooked breakfast can be a uniting force; there is a certain beauty to the way in which you can buy a meal whose basic formula is replicated everywhere from the greasiest of greasy spoons to the starchiest of table-clothed bistros. It is a model that is enjoyed by all, regardless of their social strata. There is no place for elitism at the breakfast table. It could be argued that the strict worshipping of my "breakfast canon" is a form of elitism, but I feel strongly that each of my four essentials are as mandatory in a cooked breakfast, for both traditional and practical reasons, as water, yeast, malt, and hops are in beer. Bob Marley wanted to see all of mankind live together. One way for this to happen would be for all people in society to open themselves up to baked beans. One love. One heart.

Function: hearty, but strangely marketed 3/5
Adherence to canon: No!
Taste: simply done, but done very well 5/5
Value: costly, but perfectly executed 4/5
Presentation: "urban food"?! No! And more colour please 2/5
Venue: felt homely, with calming ambience 4/5

Overall: largely superb, but driving me to over thinking everything - 4/5 

Munching with Matt at Cosy Cottage

November 2nd.

If someone was to ask you to imagine a "cosy cottage", what sort of image would your mind conjure up? An idyllic setting, no doubt deep in the beating heart of peaceful countryside. Warmth, comfort, love. A chimney and a thatched roof perhaps, with a roaring fire and maybe a dog snuffling around your feet as you either drink a steaming mug of tea or leaf through an old, yellowing James Herriott paperback. Preferably both. You are tired from a full day of walking out across fells and striding over ridges, and you are eagerly awaiting some food whilst your bones sing gratefully from the confines of the luxurious winged armchair you are happily tucked away in.

As you are summoned for dinner by the mistress of the cosy cottage, you might expect to tread softly through into a room like this:

Now myself and Matthew Earwaker hadn't been striding over ridges or walking out across fells but we had been engaged with a morning of hard sport; I had had football training and Matt had had an intense session of battledore, following on from the previous night where he had stayed up 'til 3am watching a truck race. We were both weary from our exertions and we needed a-feeding. A stint in a cosy cottage would be perfect, and so we found ourselves entering into Cosy Cottage on London Road for our post-exercise fastbreaking.

Matt and I had shared cosy residentials previously. Back at Exeter University we had been housemates for two years, and this autumn Matt has finally given in to persuasion and become the next Exeter alumnus to make the move to Brighton. We are finally reunited, and hopefully the new year will see us revisiting our former passions; 5-a-side football (previous members of The Brotherhood of Justice) and music (current members of SmoothGay). Perhaps with a teeny tiny bit of FIFA or PES thrown in for good measure. Only a tiny bit though. Just a wee bit. We don't want to stifle our productivity.

Instead of the luxurious winged armchairs, roaring fireplace, and inquisitive dog, we were met with a very chic and stylish interior, rather than a cosy one. The walls had wooden trim, there was a jagged mirror on one wall, there were fairy lights, and all of this was soundtracked by some pulsating hip beats from the stereo. It was altogether more house than cottage.

In the windows are a neon sign and a poster advertising its shisha bar, fronted by a model looking suspiciously akin to Jo O'Meara from S Club 7. A wonderful cover for this particular book. From the outside it looked as though it was going to be a good traditionalist greasy spoon, but here it looked as though they were making a concerted attempt to refine any grease into a thoroughly flashy substance that they could perhaps sell off, maybe as a knock-off Brylcreem that you could apply to your hair before hitting West Street.

And so, the breakfast:

Vegi Breakfast

2 veg sausages, 2 eggs, beans, tomato, mushrooms, 2 hash browns and toast

Vegi Breakfast - £5.95

Matt has yet to return to Brighton following the Xmas holidays, and so I have managed to find enough time to type this review up. FIFA single player doesn't grab me in the way it used to.

Okie dokie then.

Ugh.

Dr. Giggles, 26, Brighton

 To be fair to Cosy Cottage, it wasn't a disaster. The beans and the Glamorgan-style sausages were richly lovely. The beans in particular had a deep sultriness to them that surprised me. Rather like how quite a few people who frequent the hotspots of West Street are nice people underneath all of those beauty products and the simmering violence.

The hash browns were quite thin, and so were inevitably crispy. This was tempered by a mellow inside, which lacked punch. The mushrooms were cheerful, but this cheerfulness was severely hampered by the size of the portion. They seemed like an afterthought unfortunately, which was tragic since they were quite tasty.

The main problem was the cooking of the cottage; they seemed to mess their timings up a bit. Whilst the eggs had pleasantly explosive yolks, the whites managed to be both soft and crunchy simultaneously. The tomato was underdone to the point of being al dente. There had been some seasoning application, but it really needed much more time in the cooker for it to have any kind of tasty impact on the dish. The same could not be said for the toast; the bread was decent, but my cynical side wonders whether it came pre-buttered in an attempt to conceal the burning it had suffered.

It didn't feel as though much care had been put into the preparation of the breakfast. This might wash with post-pub and club grub where your inebriation means that, so long as its hot and you don't need to cook it yourself, you have a great time eating it. Breakfasts need more tenderness than this. Breakfasts should lift you up, not bring you down. A good breakfast prepares you for an adventure, rather than guiding you home. Cosy Cottage failed in these respects. It just goes to show that, whilst you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, it is even more important that you don't judge a cafe by its title.

Function: body of breakfast, mindset of kebab 2/5
Adherence to canon: Yes
Taste: some positives, but overall disappointing 2/5
Value: at least give me 2 spoonfuls of mushroom for that price 2/5
Presentation: burnt toast never looks good 2/5
Venue: Although the food adhered to the canon, the venue did not 1/5

Overall: more hard house than cosy cottage - 2/5 

Matt will be back to Brighton tomorrow hopefully. Then we'll be able to play some FIFA. Only a little bit mind. Just a tiny wee bit.