Time out with Tara at The Farm

February 28th.

Often in this blog, my fastbreaking has been a direct response to a deep existential crisis, also known as hangover vulgaris. It is an efficient solution to such times when the body is reduced to a frail and quivering wreck, and the mind wanders lost in the aching caverns of the skull. This was to be another one of those rescue missions. I was stuck in a dank spiritual gulch and need guidance back to my pastoral home. You see, the night before, The Red Diamond Dragon Club had played a gig at an event where some of us had felt that we'd been treated rather shoddily by the organisers. Some of us took to the bar in an attempt to quench our fiery anger, and once the headline band had finished we were able to retrieve our gear and head out into the night. This did not signal the end of our evening though; Tim's cousin, Tara Huzar, invited us to come to the Mash Tun, the pub in which she worked, as she had been unable to come to the gig earlier. Cue several more pints, some free shots, a crucial trip to Buddies, and a cut finger on the way home.

Unsure of the real blood/fake blood ratio

Somehow during all of this I managed to arrange to go to breakfast with Tara the next morning. She's quite busy and elusive, working at both the Mash Tun and at a local tailor (a maker of suits to the locally well-to-do) to balance the books, as well as frequently mislaying her phone. As a result I was determined to seize the opportunity at the time to schedule in some fastbreaking. There was a brief window before Tara started work again the following morning where breakfast could be eaten and so a valuable lie-in was sacrificed.

I've known Tara for a few years, ever since she first came to visit Tim as a prelude to studying at Brighton University. She is bubbly, able to chat with enthusiasm, and is always full of energy, even after a long bar shift and post-work drinking. She is also a great aficionado of cabbage. Is there a connection here? Is that why bubble and squeak is named as it is? The best take-away cabbage in Brighton is, according to Tara, available at Kebab Knight up on Lewes Road, and she is known as a regular elsewhere near her flat due to her regular cabbage requests. She recommended Kimchi as one of the finest forms of cabbage eating available, which I might hopefully be able to find a space for in my Breakfast Blog World Cup in a few months time. I had hoped to discover that kimchi was the inspiration for the Hell is for Heroes' track 'Kamichi', but careful research showed that this was in fact the name for either a Rwandan R&B artist or a South American bird, also referred to as the Horned Screamer. Not cabbage then. Unfortunately for Tara, the Farm did not offer cabbage as an option with their breakfast dishes.

And so the breakfast:

Veggie Farm Breakfast

Eggs, veggie sausages, mushrooms, tomatoes, beans, and white or granary toast

Veggie Farm Breakfast - £7

I had been recommended the Farm by several other friends and so it was high on my list of places to visit. At first glance it looked like a lovely venue; it was decked out with hefty rustic wooden furniture and was quite light and airy, with only the smallest of embellishments such as holly on the light fittings. It had a good homely feel, suiting its name, but all this would be for nothing if the food was not fit Old McDonald himself (he had a lot of animals on his farm, and so adequate sustenance was definitely a must).

Bright-eyed and bushy tailed (somehow)

It started out pretty well. The beans were like a tractor of taste, ploughing down my tastebuds with a brutal richness, full of all the salty tomatoey force I could have wished for. These were some of the best baked beans I had ever tasted, and had a heartiness that could not be rivalled by any other beans I could remember. To reference my last blog post, they were Hyppia.

When thinking of farms and food, eggs, tomatoes, and farmhouse bread may well crop up, and fortunately these too were good enough for McDonald. The eggs' dual components provided a good contrast, with soft but firm whites accompanying thick flowing yolks. The toast was crunchy and invigorating, and the tomatoes felt fresh with an edge to their juiciness.

This was all well and good, but unfortunately the arch-farmer would have been disappointed with the fleshy components on his plate had he been eating at the Farm. Both the sausage and the mushrooms failed to maintain the standard set elsewhere in this breakfast. The sausages had a great chewy solidity to them, but sadly this was offset by a tragic blandness. The mushrooms' texture also was great, smooth and juicy, but the flavours there were subtle to the point of almost non-existence.

It was these disappointing components that really brought the meal down for me. The Farm is right next to Bill's, and in order to be worth a visit it really needs to either offer something completely different, something considerably cheaper, or just do what it does with exceptional quality. Unfortunately it doesn't do any of these things, only really offering an escape from busyness and pretension. At this current pricing you should expect a little more than this, and so it is difficult for me to think of a situation where you would favour this venue over its illustrious neighbour. One could use this as an allegory for the crisis in UK agriculture if one was prone to pretension, and as the Farm offers little in the battle against pretension there seems to be nothing else I can do:

The manner in which The Farm is dominated in the field of fastbreaking works as an allegory for the crisis in UK agriculture.

Function: hearty and homely in part - 3/5
Adherence to canon: Yes
Taste: not enough of this - 2/5
Value: high price, low yield - 2/5
Presentation: spaced well on the plate,  - 3/5
Venue: lovely homely farm aesthetic - 4/5

Overall: E - I - E - I - oh well - 2.5/5