The full monty
three eggs sliders was an opportunity not to be missed for me. The only time you will ever get eggs Benedict, eggs Royale and eggs Florentine on the same plate is when somebody else is cooking – and you will always have to pay them for it.
Each tower of ciabatta, poached egg and one of spinach, bacon and salmon was perfectly contained as its own individual breakfast.
They were lined up next to each other on a large flat plate and drizzled generously with hollandaise sauce.
The slippery folds of smoked salmon took the gold medal and the spinach pipped the bacon to silver by the sheer fact I needed its greenery to compensate for the richness of the rest of the dish.
Eggs is in the name and eggs is what it did best, though. Each was poached perfectly with bouncy white shielding a delicate yolk. When popped it seeped into the creamy hollandaise sauce to create a marbled orange and yellow mix – like oil mixing with water. A thin coating of this ooze was all you needed on each mouthful.
I followed my eggs with a tower of scotch pancakes, covered by berry compote and yogurt.
The homemade, warm pancakes had risen thick and fluffy with a slight, sugary crisp around the edges. Big blobs of berry were dolloped on top of pools of fresh Greek yogurt.
I made it through the first two easily enough but the third pancake would not reduce in size no matter how much I took tiny chunks out of it.
They were delicious but in my determination to spend my full allowance of expenses I had overfaced myself. It was a mistake my stomach would later punish me for. My dad had come straight from helping my uncle knock his kitchen wall through and couldn’t look any further than the Epicure full breakfast.
He said it was decent enough but, for the price, it didn’t do much special. You could tell the sausage, bacon, eggs and black pudding was all good quality but for £9.80 there wasn’t heaps of it – only one sausage was a particular concern for my dad.
The whole meal came to £42.60, including a third black coffee. That sounds expensive for breakfast but I had eaten so much I could feel my eyelids involuntarily drooping as I paid.
As we left, people were still streaming in. I noticed a copy of the Good Food Guide 2019 perched next to the till and wondered which came first, the popularity or the awards. Based on my visit, Epicure justifies both.