Breakfast with Bryin at Galleria

9th June.

Cotton buds are dangerous. Once there was an absent-minded man who used to clean his ears out with them. One day he was giving those auditory orifices a thorough cleaning when he decided he would have a shave as well. Leaving the buds in his ears he began to shave, until his face was once again smooth and fresh-looking. To finish the job he opened his aftershave, poured a hearty amount onto his hands and...WHAM! He slammed his hands to his face in an exuberant manner and promptly fell to the floor dead, the two cotton buds having being inadvertently driven through his ears and into his brain.

I couldn't think of any other way to begin this post. Nothing crazy happened in the run-up to this week's breakfast, I just went for a breakfast with Bryin Teeny-Blackburn Lindoe (BArch). This was a story he told me, after I had mentioned that my hearing wasn't so good this week, probably due to me running out of cotton buds a day or so ago. Still, it's served to break the ice, so to speak.

Bryin is a top chap whom I have known for the last few years. During this time he has been conquering a degree in architecture; a degree that had proved tricky to begin with, but after a couple of false starts and a lot of hard graft Bryin has come through and completed it with aplomb, rather like a long-distance runner ducking for the finish line. So much so that he was selected as one of only ten people to have their dissertation appear in the Brighton University degree show book. Promising stuff, and something that hopefully indicates that Bryin is well on the way to become an arch-architect.

That's his plan now. Once his tenancy runs out in a few months Bryin will sadly be returning to Essex to start the next stage of his assault on the world of architecture. He's got his eye on a paid internship in master-planning, which hopefully involves working for an evil maverick mastermind in a bunker under the Thames (but probably doesn't). At the end of the summer he will be contributing to a furniture exhibition with a friend. There's more than just buildings to architecture, you see. Not so long ago he was involved in a folklore project in Portland, where his friend made a pub game based on the legend of the Veasta; Portland's oft-forgotten sea monster. There's much more than just buildings to architecture.

Let's think for a moment about graveyards. They're the only thing I can think of at present that cannot simply be demolished in order for a newer, better replacement to be built. Bryin explained that one reason why burial places are such sacred and hallowed places is because the bodies interred within take such a long time to break down and as such are in a recognisable state for quite a while. Burying a dead body is bad for the soil as well. Bodies rot rather than decompose, they do it slowly, deep in the earth and produce methane. All in all, it's not ideal. In 2007, a new method of body disposal was developed called promession, which basically involves freezing a body with liquid nitrogen and reducing it to a powder. Any impurities (fillings, prosthetics etc.) are filtered out and the remains can be buried in a biodegradable container in a shallow plot, composting rather than rotting. What this means is that the ground is kept healthy and ripe for growing plants. In death, new life. A much healthier way to go about things I would think, both physically and psychologically.

As well as contemplating deathstyles, Bryin is worried that since finishing his degree he has been neglecting a healthy lifestyle. For him, cooked breakfasts have become de rigueur. I tried to argue that there was no real reason that the cooked breakfast need be unhealthy. If you take each individual component and examine them then on paper they could quite easily be the components of a healthy meal. Usually it's the manner of the cooking that makes them unhealthy, but anyway, who's to begrudge a hard-working future arch-architect a week or two of fried glory?

And so, the breakfast:

Vegetarian Breakfast

Mushrooms, grilled tomato, fried egg, beans, hash brown, vegetarian sausage, slice of toast

Vegetarian Breakfast - £3.50

This was a welcome return to the realm of the familiar. Here we had all the elements of a classic cooked breakfast. All boxes ticked. No nonsense. No jiggery pokery. No alarms and no surprises. The question was, would it be done in a way that made it stand out from all the other venues that produced breakfasts cut from the same cloth, using the same time-honoured template?

Ultimately, the answer is that the breakfast had a template of its own to follow; a template of restraint. As ever, the mushrooms proved to be a weather vane of taste. Here on this plate they were fried, enough to have been soft and juicy, but not with any other flavourings with which to take them away from residing on an avenue of plainness. Similarly, the crsipy hash brown was not as salty as others I have experienced, and in terms of flavour it felt as though it was holding back. The sausage too, firm of body and thick in consistency, yet despite a promising sagey smell there was a slight hole in its taste-web. They were all lacking a certain edgy mouthfeel.

BTBL - Arch-Architect in the making

That seemed to be the crux of it; every item was superb in the texture department, yet most were lacking a little something when it came to taste. The hash brown was probably the component most guilty of this, but the beans also flattered to deceive. They were lushly creamy, but their sweetness lacked punch. Some more acerbic acidity would have been gratefully received.

It wasn't a completely one-sided story, however. The tomato was grilled marvellously, with its skin having a delicious smokey edge to supplement the fruity innards. The toast, pre-buttered for a creamy finish, had its softly-softly crunchy-crunchy ratio down perfectly, as well as tasting fine. The real triumph of the dish though was the egg. It looked like the sun floating in a snowfield. It was a pregnant egg, the yolk bursting with rich superabundance. They certainly knew what they were doing with this egg, that's for sure.

In terms of a venue, Galleria was fine. It had everything you would look for in a cafe; friendly service, table service, all the condiments and seasonings within arms reach, non-wobbly tables, coffee. Everything was in the right place, yet everything was just missing that...that...je ne sais quoi. Psychological salt, perhaps. It was akin to building a cabin in the woods with all of the things you would think a cabin in the woods would have. Walls, a roof, windows, furniture, heck, even a fireplace. But still, the cabin didn't feel like home to its owner, 'til at long last he put down a nice rug in the living room. The rug was the difference maker. So too, here. Galleria was missing a metaphorical rug, both in breakfast and in general.

Ergo, architecturally speaking Galleria is structurally sound. It is, however, missing something on an psycho-ergonomic level (if this isn't a real term it should be). Bryin strikes me as the kind of chap who is unlikely to overlook the importance of psycho-ergonomics, as his knowledge of cutting edge body disposal techniques displays. And if anyone is going to know when and where a rug is necessary, it's a chap whose written a concept album about dinosaurs. There's a psycho-ergonomically sound creative project right there. There's much, much more than just buildings to architecture.

Function: did the job 3/5
Adherence to canon: Yes! Sweet relief!
Taste: did the job 3/5
Value: everything you look for, for minimal monies 4/5
Presentation: did the job 3/5
Venue: did the job 3/5

Overall: needs one of those psycho-rugs draped over it 3/5