Hey Brit dopers,
I will have a 9+ hour layover in Heathrow in September, and I think I’ll go downtown for a bit. Where can I have the best traditional English breakfast on a Monday morning?
Thanks!
This might actually be a bit of a tough one as English Breakfasts aren’t really the type of food that people will specialise in (at least I’ve never seen it). You often get the best breakfasts in hotels, especially B&B’s, given that they get a lot of practice at it.
Your best bet is probably going to be finding a decent pub.
This place looks like a 1970s working mens club, but the food is amazing. It’s under the meat market, so you can’t get fresher ingredients.
Thank you, JacobSwan. That sounds like exactly the place I’m looking for. Awesome!
I went there, and it was every bit as good as I expected. I had the “world famous butcher’s breakfast”, a choice I can heartily recommend to any meat lover.
Moving thread to Cafe Society from IMHO.
Interesting about B&Bs. I haven’t been to a great many, but in the States it seems that the included breakfast at a B&B is rarely more than a bowl of cold granola.
Anecdotal: It’s easily been ten years since I last stayed in a B&B in the UK (Edinburgh), but the incredibly charming landlady gave us a delicious full breakfast every day.
I’m glad you liked it. But I’m now hungry. I feel a trip may be in order this week some time!
This is somewhat misleading. There are lots of places that do good English Breakfasts, (i.e. you’ll find them in pretty much every town and city in the UK) but they’re hard for tourists to spot because they’re not branded and they tend not to have to advertise. Nor will they be open in the evenings, or possibly even after lunch because they do, in fact, specialise in breakfast.
They’re known broadly as caffs (as in cafe); something like a diner except often without waitstaff. They’re almost always independently run. There’s usually a number of set breakfasts you can have, covering different combinations of bacon, sausage, egg, hash browns, black pudding, beans, tomato, mushroom; there may also be some more outlandish options such as bubble and squeak or kidneys. Some will even offer chips with their breakfasts, although purists will frown on this. Tea and toast will come pretty much as standard. They’re usually very good value in terms of bot h taste and calories per pound sterling.
There’s a good resource for finding London based ones here. You probably won’t many find right smack in the big city-centre tourist areas but you shouldn’t have to go too far out of your way.
B&Bs, as noted, tend to do really good breakfasts. Hotels tend to overcharge compared to cafes and large ones suffer from the demands of mass catering.
Depends what you mean by ‘best’. In some circumstances a greasy caff is just what the doctor ordered. The warmth, the noise, the tabloids, the chatter, the artery-clogging but oh-so-tasty fried food.
But you might also want to try the same kind of food cooked to perfection by top chefs. If the latter, then (and I’ve recommended this a few times before) The Wolseley next to the Ritz also does a full English breakfast, top-quality ingredients, and is an amazingly lovely restaurant. Not cheap, but exquisite. Definitely not the same experience as a caff, but great in its own right.