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