Saturday 11 July 2015

Review: The Breakfast Club

Being a pretty conscious spender (as I'm nearly always broke) one of the things I absolutely hate doing is dishing out a lot of money on food. Now don't get me wrong - I am a massive foodie. I love discovering cute vintage cafes in London that have colourful bunting and fairy lights and little chalkboards, and that serve homemade food in imaginative ways and tumblr-like jars with ribbons, and healthy salads with handwritten labels on them and baby cakes and old fashioned sweets and faded signs with retro fonts - I could literally go on forever...
However I feel like these places, although extremely photo-worthy (my Instagram thrives off them) are sadly quite expensive as they are not large chains and therefore quite small-run businesses (I think?).

It had genuinely got to the point where me and my friends would spend whole days wandering through various areas of town, popping into these sorts of cafes/shops, spending hours in each one taking photos of all the food and decor, asking the waitresses tons of questions and then leaving without buying a thing.

(If you're interested, one of the places we did this was Ottolenghi near Angel, which is more well known but basically a cafe famous for its many cakes, giant swirly meringues, and also huge round platters of different homemade salads which you can pick and choose from. We spent such a long time there holding up the whole queue with our cameras that we felt awful leaving empty handed, so my friend reluctantly bought the smallest portion of salad she could find, which was still £10.50!)

Anyway, recently scrolling through my Instagram feed, I came across quite a few posts of delicious looking pancakes which were tagged with the location The Breakfast Club, Islington. Apparently there's also one in Shoreditch but since one of my friends lives in Islington, and I know that area better anyway, we went to that one. It was even nicer than I thought it would be - the decor was so cosy and pretty with colourful (but not too bright) walls, corkboards spattered with hundreds of polaroid pictures, the retro fonts which I mentioned earlier, fairy lights, bunting and wooden tables.




After glancing at the menu I decided to order the granola with Greek yoghurt, pear and raspberry compote and flaked almonds (£5.50) while my friends went for the porridge with berries (£4.50) and the pancake stack with vanilla cream and berries (£9.00) respectively. I also tried the Beetle-Juice - a beetroot, carrot, apple and ginger juice, which was very strong but delicious if you don't mind a strong, bitter taste. Obviously we all took lots of artsy pictures which this time we felt we deserved, because we were actually buying things for once!


This is actually a photo my friend took *looks sheepish* because she was organised enough to bring her proper camera and the photos I took on my phone were awful. 


I'd heard mixed reviews about the actual food at The Breakfast Club - many told me it was the best breakfast they'd ever had while others said that, with such beautiful decor and atmosphere, the food let the place down. I thought mine was delicious, and even though I could probably make something similar at home, this was reflected nicely in the price range as the dishes which could be made easily at home (such as the porridge) were visibly cheaper. I would definitely recommend it, and I myself really want to go back there again at some point to try one of the savoury dishes like the avocado and poached egg toast and maybe one of the smoothies which sounded great as well. I also heard they do lunch and dinner there, and checked out the online menu - it looks surprisingly good considering I thought this was a place only for breakfast (the Super Green salad with buttermilk fried chicken sounds especially yum).

xoxo


2 comments:

  1. Your friendship group sounds fabulous if that's the sort of activities you do. This place looks so cute, I've heard great things about it but I think you pay for the novelty.
    Anna x
    www.collectionsofimperfections.blogspot.co.uk

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  2. Yes you're right it probably is the uniqueness of the atmosphere rather than the food that you pay for, but to be honest the (very photogenic) decor was the main reason I went there anyway so I'm not complaining! :)
    xoxo

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