Lily Rae’s Search for the Best Breakfast in Brighton: The Hangover Burrito at the Marwood

The Hangover Burrito.

The Marwood has been in my bad books for a while. When I first moved to Brighton three years ago I was enamoured with the idea of a whole coffee-shop based on one of my favourite films (Withnail & I), with a huge picture of Richard E Grant greeting you as you walked in and a note from Uncle Monty in the toilet telling you “you look fab today!” Today, although I look fab, I’ve realised with some sadness that it’s basically the Hard Rock Cafe for hipsters – a big in-joke, where the style is just stylish enough to make you forget about the lack of substance.

Legs! Mental!

Or, indeed, the lack of coffee – £2.25 is enough to buy you a decent cappuccino anywhere except the Marwood. The coffee that you’re given is marvellous – the problem is, you only get about a teaspoon full, because their tiny trendy mugs are so tiny and trendy. The Marwood and I have had the kind of relationship where all your conversations are in film quotes – it’s cute at first, but dear god, you want to punch them after the fourteenth “WHY COULDN’T YOU PUT THE BUNNY BACK IN THE BOX?” (Con Air).

Plus, they didn’t even take my CV when I went in there to apply for a job. These grapes sure are sour

Anyway. For years the only food they offered was cake (which is apparently life-changing, but I don’t like cake, so it’s unlikely it would ever have changed my life for the better) and molten-hot baked bean and cheese toasties (which were amazing, even if the top of your mouth did feel like you’d attempted self-administered dentistry with a soldering iron). So imagine my slight surprise when Emy informed me that she’d seen a HANGOVER BURRITO ON THE MARWOOD MENU.

The now deceased Breakfast Burrito at the Bubble Cafe is the breakfast by which I judge all other breakfasts. It was just the most wonderful experience I’ve ever had on a regular basis before 12pm. Intrigued by the possibility of a similarly Mexican-inspired breakfast, I headed down to the Marwood to see what the fuss was all about.

Dear The World: stop putting coriander on my breakfast. It’s foul.

The Hangover Burrito is £6.95. It consists of sausage, scrambled egg, bacons, mushrooms and beans inside a tortilla with salsa and salad on the side and grilled cheese on top. With a cappuccino as well, my whole breakfast was just under a tenner – not ideal, but certainly not a bad deal. A dreadlocked waiter wearing a vest and smelling of armpit brought it over. It was stodgy and heavy and, had I had a hangover, it would have certainly done the job. As it is, it was a bit bland – the sausage, beans, egg and bacon were so tightly compacted inside the tortilla they’d formed a kind of breakfast-sludge-tube – and although there was plenty of everything, there was no dynamic in the tastes. It was all slightly smokey, with a creamy but somewhat lacking texture. The sausage, which was sliced up into little meaty coins, reminded me of the mini sausages you get in tins of special spaghetti hoops, while there was nothing to be said of the bacon – you couldn’t tell what you were eating. It was more like eating a rolled-up smoked quesadilla than anything else. The tortilla was slightly sweet and very thick, like an old pancake, and the salsa was essentially a handful of diced tomato. I was disappointed, because never before have I eaten a burrito – breakfast or not – where I’ve had to add Tabasco for flavour as well as kick. Then again, my standards are extremely high.

But credit where it’s due. It fills you up, and although there is very little variety in terms of taste or texture, the taste and texture you doget is satisfying and rich. A burrito it ain’t, though – if it were my recipe, I would replace the beans with refried beans, throw in a slop of guacamole and grated cheddar rather than grilled (I’m not a fan of grilled cheese anyway), and sprinkle some fresh chilli on the top. I love all the flavours and textures of an amazing fry-up, which is why I’m hunting to

Full o’ beans.

find the best one. That said, it just ain’t right to call something a burrito if it doesn’t taste remotely Mexican. IT IS CULTURAL REAPPROPRIATION YEAH?

The Marwood has only recently opened its kitchen to anything other than toasties, so perhaps these are wobbly first steps. More spice, more ingredients, and more texture will surely find their way into the Hangover Burrito with time. And as the menu says, most of the products are sourced locally  and guilt-free (I know avocadoes, chillis and beans are not traditionally grown in Brighton) and “prepared by a complete moron working for a complete idiot.” Their words, not mine!

As Michael Fassbender says in Prometheus: “Big things have small beginnings.” He was definitely talking about the Hangover Burrito.

I AWARD THIS BREAKFAST: SIX SAUSAGES OUT OF TEN.

Lily Rae’s Search for the Best Breakfast in Brighton: The Dumb Waiter.

Would you believe I’ve been here three years – three! – and never been to the Dumb Waiter?

I think I deliberately ignored it because the outside of the cafe is covered with graffiti characters from the Beano, and god knows I hate the Beano – it’s badly drawn and it basically tells you to go out and bully small people and be rude to girls and your parents. However, given that I’m trying to stave off my Tiffany’s review for as long as possible, I thought I’d give it a shot.

Skinny tattooed hipster.

It was the first sunny Saturday in weeks (and probably the last) and the little cafe was packed with skinny tattooed hipsters who looked incapable of digesting anything other than liquidised tofu and a copy of the New Statesman. I didn’t realise it had both an upstairs and an outside dining area, so we scrambled to the nearest table we could find, cemented our arses firmly in, and got to work.

The menu for Dumb Waiter gives you three ‘set breakfasts’, or you can build your own from a list of sides. The set breakfast I went for, Number 3, consisted of a fried egg, two sausages, two pieces of bacon and a choice of grilled tomatoes or baked beans. For £4.60, that seems pretty good, yes?

No. It’s not good. Something’s missing.

What’s missing? Have a think, you’ll get it in a second…

That’s right. No toast.

SOMETHING IS MISSING.

No toast with your breakfast! For the sake of making the damn thing a breakfast at all, I paid an extra £1.05 for two pieces of toast. I also paid an extra £1.25 for two hash browns. What a feckless hedonist I am!

One good thing about Dumb Waiter is that you get a free cup of tea or instant coffee with your breakfast. Perhaps that’s because they felt guilty about the toast. That said, fresh coffee is 50p extra, and instant coffee reminds me of working in admin.

Onto the food.

The sausage was very tasty – it had a lovely sage flavour and tasted like it might have been made of real meat, but the texture was very odd. Outside was perfect, brown and slightly sticky and crispy – inside was a weird fleshy, soft texture. I bit it into it and it seemed to dissolve. The egg was also really good, with a nice, rich, bright orange yolk and a slightly crispy white. A great improvement on my last egg!

Sadly, the toast (which I may remind you a paid extra for!) was not toast. It was slightly hardened-at-the-edges bread – granted it was posh bread, with seeds and stuff in it. So I guess in that sense I should have been a bit more appreciative of the fact that it was barely toast. Well I wasn’t, because it was a stodgy nightmare to cut and was immune to soaking up bean-juice. (This is reading like bad porn now, isn’t it? It’s because I am in fact E. L. James [topical joke].) The bacon was tasty and thick, but very salty (even more E. L. James) and I couldn’t finish it – which is very much a first for me. I think the size of the two bacon rashers, PLUS the two sausages, was a bit of a meat overload. Yeah, OK, I’m revoking my meat-licence and putting on my wuss hat.

The little sausage that could.

The hash browns were mainly lovely – crunchy and fluffy – and I’m going to give Dumb Waiter the benefit of the doubt and assume that the giant lumps of potato in the middle were nothing to do with them. The grilled tomatoes were also little lumps of perfection, with that ‘sexy grandma’ quality I wrote about last time.

Overall, the food I got was alright. It wasn’t a patch on the Seven Bees but it wasn’t dreadful – the taste of everything was delicious, but the texture of the food was off in places. I’m still a bit affronted at having to pay extra for toast when it’s a staple of any fry-up – hash browns are a bit more exotic, I don’t mind having to pay for them, and the other sides on the menu included mushrooms, black pudding and the like. But toast? Get tae fuck.

My originally £4.60 breakfast – which sounds fab – ended up being £6.87, which is less fab. Not bad, Dumb Waiter, but not great either.

 I HEREBY AWARD YOU… SIX SAUSAGES OUT OF TEN.

Lily Rae’s Search for the Best Breakfast in Brighton – Seven Bees Cafe.

I’m going to level with you – this ain’t a Tiffany’s review.

I’ve been to Tiffany’s before, had their breakfast, and within four beans realised it was a terrible breakfast. Plus I was commissioned by the Seven Bees Cafe to write a review of their breakfast and when someone asks you so nicely (and appeals to your internet ego by assuming your opinion on their fry-up is worth something) how the hell can you refuse?

So off I toddled, runny nose and blocked sinuses in tow (I have a hideous cold this week), to the Seven Bees Cafe.

Breakfast #2 – The Seven Bees’ Cafe’s Big Breakfast.

The first thing you need to know about the Seven Bees Cafe is that you basically need a divining rod and a sausage-seeking missile to be able to find it. It’s hidden under piles of streets in the posh lanes (the ones nearest the sea) on Ship Street Gardens, near an erotic boutique and an art gallery. The outside of the cafe is painted bright yellow, and they’ve written ‘Seven Bees Cafe’ on the window in felt tip.

Emy and I were the only people in there. It’s a tiny little cafe, with daisy-patterned tablecloths and a tinny-sounding radio just about audible over the sound of frying bacon. It feels like sitting in a friend’s kitchen.

I ordered the Big Breakfast, which consists of a fried egg, two pieces of toast, two rashers of bacon, a sausage and beans. I got to eat Emy’s fried tomatoes though, because the poor lamb don’t like ‘em. SUCKAAAAA.

Seven Bees’ Big Breakfast

I’ll start by saying that the sausage was the BEST SAUSAGE I’VE HAD IN BRIGHTON. It looked, smelled, and tasted exactly how a sausage should – slightly burnt but not bitter on the outside, cooked throughout to a nice brown-grey, and actually tasting of something that used to snuffle around a farm full of the vim and vigour of life, as opposed to the all-too common wet-fluff-in-a-condom sausage (I’m looking at you, Tiffany). The sausage also has the added bonus of making this play in your head as you bite into it. Cor yeah!

The bacon was great too – really dark and tough without being chewy, smoky but not too salty. Like the hide of Clint Eastwood’s favourite boot. The toast was crunchy and saturated with butter; Mr Seven Bees informs us that his mate makes the bread from scratch in Hove, which is probably why it tastes like bread and not like polystyrene. All the beans were in good working order, and there were many of them – but just the right amount so as not to be left with a bean-surplus after all the important stuff has been scoffed. The fried tomato was the seductive grandma of the piece, with a soft, wrinkly skin hiding a hot, juicy core. So far, so delicious.

Now, onto the egg.

The fried egg, as I’ve mentioned before, is a difficult thing to master. It’s not as simple as cracking an egg into a hot pan and then scooping into your mouth. It has to be perfect to avoid salmonella-paranoia (or as I’ve decided to call it, salmonoia) – no clear bits, outside of the yolk firm but still runny in the middle. Crispy bits on the edge of the egg-white (I’ve put far too much thought into this.)

Seven Bees’ egg was just ok. Just ok. Yellow yolk, cooked all the way round, no salmonoia. But after the deliciousness of its meaty sisters, the bacon and the sausage, the egg was not as exciting as it could have been – the yolk wasn’t that rich or tasty, and it seemed to know it, hiding its shame under the beans. Imagine a festival line-up consisting of The Smiths (the sausage), Kate Bush (the bacon) and The Proclaimers (the egg). I love the Proclaimers and have seen them live many times, but after Kate Bush and The Smiths, you’d feel a bit deflated knowing that The Proclaimers were next. A good egg, but not my favourite.

The Black Dynamite of coffees

All extended metaphors considered, the Seven Bees Breakfast is a really bloody good one. You get the big breakfast for £4.95, and for an extra £1 you get a giant mug of the blackest, bitterest, bestest filter coffee ever. I’m a coffee fan and I usually pooh-pooh sugar if it’s offered, but this coffee was rich and dark and handsome. For once, I wasn’t sweet enough.

The breakfast itself, being just short of a fiver, is unquestionably delicious and of a really good quality for the price. The cafe is well-hidden, too, so it’s probably quiet on the busiest days – an essential part of the three step hangover cure (1. Fry-up. 2. Silence. 3. Darkness.) Without the coffee, you’ll spend juuuuuuust under a fiver with a princely 5p in change – but the Rocky Balboa of sausages is worth it.

I AWARD THIS BREAKFAST – NINE SAUSAGES OUT OF TEN.

Emy’s Nights In: Shaun of the Dead

With the hellfire of post graduation-blues burning a hole in my pocketbook (as well as soul), going to the cinema seems like a luxury these days. Thus, the hunt for already-seen films you can watch over and over again has begun!

image: http://www.bookchickcity.com

When it’s time to bring out the snacks and place yourself in front of the tv for 90 minutes of solid entertainment, forget the Euros and instead put on one of the funniest films of the last decade; Shaun of the Dead. Who doesn’t like a good, old zombie flick? Horror has never been a favourite genre of mine, but mix it up with comedy/spoof and I will gladly watch it over and over again. That is, if it produces a script half as funny as this one. You know what you’re in for when the film opens by comparing zombies to people worn down by mind-numbingly boring trivial jobs, with limbs moving slowly and close-ups of expressionless faces.

Our protagonist Shaun, portrayed by Simon Pegg, is stuck in a dead end job as well as a dead end relationship when the world falls spectacularly to pieces. His girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) dumps him at the same time as London is hit by a mysterious plague which sees the dead coming back to life, hunting for human flesh to quench their hunger. As the film starts off, we are  bombarded by groaning sounds time and time again, expecting to see zombies but instead get  people yawning or sleepily making their way out of bed in the morning. In fact, in the beginning Shaun is unaware of the capital’s descent into apocalyptic nightmare territory, and manoeuvres his way through London unknowingly dodging zombies at every corner, to the delight of the audience.

As the zombies grow in numbers and the outbreak starts to worsen, Shaun and his best friend and flatmate, childish slacker Ed, played by Nick Frost, round up Shaun’s mother (Penelope Wilton) and stepfather (Bill Nighy) as well as Liz and her friends David (Dylan Moran) and Diane (Lucy Davis) and decide to head to the safest place they can think of; the local pub. There one of the funniest scenes of the film plays out while the group attempt to subdue the undead pub landlord to the sounds of Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. I defy you to keep a straight face during this gem of comedic perfection.

The acting is all round superb, and I especially love Ashfield’s level headed Liz, who does not show any signs of damsel in distress, nor loses her cool but instead stays strong and gets on with the business of surviving. Excessive amounts of blood and gore are not needed in this film, since the dialogue is its biggest plus, but when blood and gore inevitably, of course, appear even that is done in a hilarious manner. Alongside the gore and comedy, the film even has a tender side where human relationships are excellently portrayed in a very real manner, touching on romantic love, friendship and family.

Finally, if a zombie apocalypse should occur and I was given a choice to try and fight off the undead with any film cast, it would be this one. Comedy, bad ass rifles, sarcasm and a pint of beer? Count me in.

 

Lily Rae’s Search for the Best Breakfast in Brighton.

Before writing this, I could name my favourite breakfast-joint in Brighton without even having to think about it. The Bubble Kitschen’s Mexican breakfast was, quite simply, the best breakfast in the city. A big tortilla stuffed with beans, cheese, chilli sauce, guacamole, spicy fried potatoes, chopped tomatoes and topped off with a fried egg, washed down with black coffee. It was a big, bad, spicy, carby breakfast which was pretty much the only tonic to my gin-induced university hangovers – it took me months to notice that there wasn’t any meat on the plate. I’m usually of the view that a meal without meat is a Satanic travesty, but the all-vegetarian Mexican Breakfast stealthily seduced me without my ever once suspecting.

So imagine my HORROR when I turned up at the Bubble Kitschen one Sunday morning, having prepared accordingly by acquiring a bastard hangover, only to find that it had left town. The glorious Mexican breakfast, along with its lesser brothers, the full English and the gutbuster, had been struck off the blackboard with an arrogant Tippex pen – the Bubble Kitschen had nothing to offer me but a handful of stupid smoothies and organic pancakes with some healthy nonsense on top. Spicy fried potatoes were out, blueberries were in. Distraught was not the word.

My favourite breakfast in the whole wide world had vanished without leaving so much as a note on the pillow.

When I’d calmed down, I firmly resolved to find a new favourite breakfast. One worthy of my gin-soaked guts; a breakfast I could pay for with a shaking handful of student shrapnel which would give me the strength I needed to survive the day. I began…

THE SEARCH FOR BRIGHTON’S BEST BREAKFAST.

Breakfast #1: Capers’ Fried Breakfast.

You’ve probably walked past the ugly purple front of the entirely unremarkable Capers, with its hideous comic-sans sign and rattling metal tables, without so much as looking at the menu (incidentally, there isn’t a single caper on it). I’d barely glanced at it before last week, except to tut at the way it was standing between me and CyberCandy. I and two friends, desperate for stodgy relief, decided to try it out.

Breakfast Number 1

Your standard Full English Breakfast – which included two pieces of toast, a sausage, a piece of bacon, beans, a fried egg and mushrooms (I paid an extra 80p for a hash brown) – sets you back £4.50. Impressive, given that many of the cafes in Brighton charge at least six quid for a decent breakfast – you can chomp your way through a Capers full English for a fiver, and still have change.

It was also unusually well-presented for a full English – with mysterious sprinkles of paprika on the edge of the plate, and an even more mysterious sprig of parsley on the beans.

It was a perfect egg – runny in the middle but without giving you the half-second paranoia that it might give you salmonella, which so many greasy spoon eggs do – though the beans and the hash brown could have been a bit warmer. It’s very important your beans are hot, because they tend to touch everything else on the plate and six or seven lukewarm beans can ruin an otherwise hot mouthful. The mushrooms were perfectly fried without being greasy, and even the bog-standard sausage was alright – it was a cheap sausage, nothing to write home about, but the skin was crispy and the inside was cooked through. The toast wasn’t spectacular – no taste to it, just triangles of crunchy white toast bread not-quite-enough butter – but it certainly did the job and it held my beans together like a trooper. There is nothing worse than your toast disintegrating under too many beans halfway to your mouth and so Capers’ toast-resilience merits an enthusiastic toes-up from me.

The bacon mystified me. It looked like it should have been an awful, pale, limp wrist of a rasher, and I was apprehensive about it – bugger me though, it was alright. Smoky and slightly crispy, just how I like it, though I have no idea where the crispiness was hiding. Coffee was alright too – nothing special, but it didn’t taste like instant coffee (which, incidentally, is what the Bubble Kitschen’s coffee tasted like). A strong contender for Best Breakfast in Brighton – I could have eaten more than I was given, though for £4.50 I certainly wasn’t cheated.

I AWARD THIS BREAKFAST – 8 SAUSAGES OUT OF 10.

NEXT WEEK… Tiffany’s! (The one with Audrey Hepburn on it)