Lounging with Louise at the Alcampo Lounge

March 20th.

As my previous post alluded, Brighton moves fast. When I used to live just off of St. James' Street, I noticed one particular takeaway change its name at least five times in three years (my personal favourite name was Armani Kebabs). Another "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" moment was the surreal change that Sawadee Thai restaurant underwent, when it became an Italian for about a week before reverting to Thai. Inexplicable, especially as both its Thai and Italian incarnations provided delicious food. It was as though the owner had gone on holiday for a week, and whoever had been left in charge decided to go rogue, Colonel Kurtz-style.

One place in Brighton in particular that is currently undergoing a lot of change is London Road. Many old establishments have been receiving facelifts or flashy re-openings, and in other places new, exciting enterprises are starting up. There are new student residencies being built to open in the autumn, and so it looks as though lots of funds are being made available in order to have the area looking as enticing as possible for when the scholars come to town. One of these new, exciting enterprises is the Alcampo Lounge.

I had no idea that The Lounges were a chain. Heck, I didn't even notice that this place existed until Louise Wilde suggested we go there for our breakfast, despite walking down London Road on my way home from work most days. I first met Louise through my old friend and bandmate Olli, and when we played a series of benefit gigs for the Big Lemon bus company she made a couple of...erm...big lemons...for us to garnish the venues with. She is a very creative and enterprising lass with great skill, and if there was ever to be a further need for football-sized lemons then there are few people in Brighton better to call upon.

At the time of our meeting, Louise was searching for a different direction, a new vocation. This meant that she had a lot of free time and was spending a fair bit of it on the Internet. As I well know, the combination of free time and Internet often leads down the road of procrastination, but as Louise discovered procrastination is not always fruitless. During a particular session, she entered a competition and ended up winning a holiday to Switzerland! The moral to this story? Internet procrastination is definitely a good thing. I gave up YouTube for Lent in an attempt to be more productive, but as you may have noticed in the gap between blog posts here, this hasn't exactly been the case...

So we found ourselves sitting in the Alcampo Lounge, a mammoth place that sprung up overnight like a mutant snowdrop. It looked nice, with lots of comfy wooden furniture and sofas, and also featuring a book share in one corner. It felt ambitious. Its mere existence was a statement of intent. Would this ambition and intent be matched in its food?

And so, the breakfast:

Vegetarian Breakfast

Sweetcorn fritters, hash browns, grilled tomato, baked beans, button mushrooms, spinach, hummus, fried egg, and toast

Vegetarian Breakfast - £6.95

It looked pretty cool. The above photo should serve as an "after" shot; here is a "before":

It was as though the toast was a hat! This was pleasing. Also pleasing was the fact that I got a free filter coffee thrown in with the meal. Less pleasing was the absence of hummus in the mix, which would have been interesting to sample in a full cooked breakfast, but I was still to experience sweetcorn fritters for the first time, and for this I was thankful.

These then, the most exciting of the components, were first to be tried. They were pleasant; light, with a hint of coriander and a similarity to falafel in texture. They would not have been out of place as part of an Indian meal, and although the flavour wasn't strong they did provide a nice difference in texture to the plate.

Bonus tea too? Bribery!

The other carb-y elements, the toast and hash browns, were polar opposites to each other on the carbohydrate scale. The toast was soft and limp whilst the hash browns had a wonderful hard crispiness to their outer shells. This thin crunch gave way to lovely fluffy innards.

Unfortunately, many of the components charged with bringing strong flavours to the breakfast did not manage to rise to the occasion. The beans were slightly bland, and the egg, despite a bulbous yolk, had an anonymous white to it. The mushrooms were dry and tasted plain. The tomato had a good texture to it, soft, fleshy and warm, but lacked any sharpness.

Each of these items could have had an additional edge to them, which would really have made the breakfast a more exciting proposition. Only the spinach managed to achieve any kind of power in its flavour, being salty and rich. The care shown in the cooking of the spinach should have been extended to the rest of the dish.

A lot of flavours went missing (figuratively), and perhaps the dish would have been aided by the hummus not going missing (literally). Ultimately this breakfast was a case of something looking good on paper and not delivering on the plate. Talking the talk but failing to walk the walk. Is this an accusation that could be levelled at the Alcampo Lounge in general? Potentially. Both the venue and the meal seemingly rose swiftly out of nowhere in a glorious statement of intent, but both left me feeling slightly disappointed in the aftermath.

Function: lacking in fiery heart - 2/5
Adherence to canon: Yes
Taste: disappointingly shallow - 2/5
Value: decent amount matched in price - 3/5
Presentation: superbly laid out - 5/5
Venue: looks good, masking other shortcomings - 3/5

Overall: as powerful as lounge music - 3/5