Joining Janoh at Moksha Cafe

April 20th.

Ah, the good old days. One of the most regular areas of conversation around the cooked breakfast table. When you are too tired/hungover to bear thinking about the future, great comfort can be found by looking back to a brighter time before dehydration and lack of sleep took hold. I haven't really had many chats about the good old days on this blog thus far, but when I went for breakfast with Ian "Janoh" Humberstone over the Easter weekend we managed to have a decent one.

Janoh is a friend from the good old days when I studied at Exeter University. Since we finished our studies there I have only seen him sparingly; for a short period when he was considering a move to Brighton, once when I was up in Edinburgh for a family event (which led to us climbing up Arthur's Seat with a birdsong vinyl), and once when he visited Brighton to perform a gig in our living room. Once again, Janoh was coming to Brighton to perform some of his folk music.

At present, Janoh is involved in Folklore Tapes; "an ongoing research and heritage project exploring the folkloric arcana of the farthest-flung recesses of Great Britain and beyond...through abstracted musical reinterpretation and experimental visuals." He was on his way back to Exeter in association with this project and dropped in for some Easter-based shenanigans along with some performance. If you click on that link you will see that a whole lot of love and dedication is going into this project. He's a talented chap with passion strong enough to haul lost folklore out from the archives and into the fresh sunlight of the now. He truly is the folklore equivalent of the cooked breakfast, aiding the re-energising transition from past to future.

After the breakfast I was going to be heading to a nearby pub to watch a couple of football matches. In a nebulous manner we began talking about our supporting of football, and how for Janoh the teams that were in the Premiership at the time when he first started following football are the teams that should be in the Premiership now. He still can't believe that Oldham Athletic aren't regularly facing off against Manchester United and co. on a weekly basis.

It is funny how the connexions we make when we are young are often ones that stay strong with us throughout our lives. There's a lot to be said about that with regards to folk music, and how old a form of art it is. You could also argue that breakfast shares a similar venerability. If you were that way inclined (like me).

And so, the breakfast:

 Vegetarian Breakfast

Grilled field mushroom with roasted vine tomatoes, wilted spinach, free range eggs, baked beans and sourdough toast

Vegetarian Breakfast - £7.25

Now, was this a large amount of food, or was the plate small? It's difficult to tell in retrospect just from looking at the photo, but my sourdough toast did happen to topple of the plate on more than one occasion. This proved distracting when all I wanted to do was rip into my breakfast (after some careful painstaking note-taking of course). When I was able to relax without worrying about whether the breakfast would remain on the plate, I was able to enjoy some good warm flavours.

Most of the dish's components were very juicy. The tomatoes and mushrooms were positively sweating. The good kind of sweating, from vigorous exercise, rather than the bad kind that comes from being overweight and sitting in front of a computer indoors all day. Flavours backed up their juice, with the tomatoes carrying a rich fruitiness and the mushrooms seasoned with pepper. Slight disjunction was to be found with their texture however, with peppercorns present upon the otherwise smooth 'shrooms, and the vine doing nothing for me. It's only purpose seemed to be to suggest wholesome freshness, and in this capacity it failed.

Janoh (left) and Robin (right) performing some folk

The breakfast, you see, seemed to be swimming in either juice or butter, and when I finished eating there remained a lake of this residue. This undid any aspirations of healthy freshness that a rough wiry bit of vine may have had, and though such a lake was not necessarily a bad thing in itself, there were just not enough carbohydrate components on the plate to soak it up. Only the rigorously crunchy toast was there to do this. More carbs, either extra toast or some hash browns for instance, would have made a massive difference.

The majority of this lake was seemingly provided by the spinach. This was incredibly buttery. Peppery as well, but moreso buttery. The other moisture providing items were far less fluid. The beans were warm, silken, and sweet, but not moist. The eggs (I opted for poached) disappointingly had solid yolks, rather like hard boiled eggs. This laid blame of the juice lake mainly on the doorstep of the spinach. Naughty spinach.

Overall, it was a tasty breakfast, but with a few logistical flaws. My enjoyment of the meal would have been much greater had some extra carbohydrate options been present, to aid in soaking up the all-pervading juice and to provide a wider textural variety. A large plate would also have made a difference. Moksha is a pleasant cafe with good ambience which does great work with hot drinks and cakes. It still needs a little bit more though when cooked breakfasts are concerned. A larger table wouldn't have gone amiss either.

Function: in parts homely, in others stressful - 3/5
Adherence to canon: Yes
Taste: good strong flavours abounded - 4/5
Value: possibly a bit too much for these problems - 2/5
Presentation: good bean segregation but plate felt small - 3/5
Venue: nice but better suited to hot drinks - 3/5

Overall: bit too juicy - 3/5