I am going to borrow from Russell Davies
here, whose book Egg, Bacon, Chips & Beans is well worth a read if you’re a
fan of the British caff. On visiting the Shepherdess Café, on a dark December
morning, he remarked on it glowing like an Edward Hopper painting. I reproduce
his photo here, so you can appreciate what a good observation that is.
If you are to take one thing out of this
review, it should be this. My boyfriend’s breakfast was so big, it came on two
plates. (Three if you count the plate of toast).
He manfully opted for the Cop the Lot. A
lumpy sea of beans came on the separate plate, because his first plate was
packed solid with black pudding, bacon, sausage, hash browns, mushrooms, tomato
and eggs. There were the traditional
(for the Shep) few chips - four in number actually - as if they had fallen out
of the fryer and been added as garnish, rather than deliberately placed there
as a component of the meal.
It really was a plate to ‘ooh’ and ‘aaah’
over – a bit like if someone brings a cake with candles to the table. You just
want to get a look at it and take a snap.
I rather modestly went for sausages, hash
browns and tomatoes with white toast.
Despite it being a third of the size of his, it still very successfully
kept hunger locked up til lunch.
Note the artful scoring of my sausages in
the photo. I’m not sure this is a cooking technique that the Cordon Bleu would advocate
but it certainly makes eating easier – it gives you a ready made point in which
to plunge your knife.
The Shepherdess is my local and I am very
fond of it. There are few places that combine pictures of the glitterati who
have breakfasted there (All Saints, Barry from Eastenders, Jamie Oliver) with a
sign telling workmen to keep their boots off the seats.
It’s incredibly well-appointed. Bang on the
busy City Road, and bathed in light from the windows, you feel like you are in
a goldfish bowl in the middle of a roundabout. There is no bad place to sit in
this joint – fact – because of the mirrored backwall, which allows you to see
everything.
The staff are sweet. The seats are fixed.
The menu is straight out of Goodnight Sweetheart – liver sausage, sardines on
toast, tinned salmon.
Your order is greasily written on greasy paper, and very efficiently dealt with at the till by the door when you leave. Personal bugbear of waiting for your bill = neatly avoided here.
I noticed on this visit that they have made
the menu a touch more gimmicky with names for the breakfasts, Little Chef
style. Cop The Lot, Veggie Feast, Cinnamon Pancake Girl (OK, the last one was
mine).
Yet it remains a traditional place, where
an eclectic mix of people take a quick pit-stop in their day. And as such, it’s
as much an example of the British condition as it is the British caff.
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