Canteen London

The cliché goes that you should breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and have dinner like a pauper. Fine words! No mention of dining with the Queen!! Our lives are all topsy turvy; our biggest and most expensive meals are all dinner, washed down with copious amounts of alcohol. Last Sunday we thought let’s try eating like the cliché so we went bright and early to the Farmers Market held in the Cramer Street car part in Marylebone and HRH the Queen had her customary half dozen Oysters. I am not a fan of Oysters, for one I don’t like their consistency and two I am petrified of falling violently ill after eating a bad one. Anyway, these are not things that have every daunted Blue Blooded Royalty.

After the Oysters we popped into Canteen. This is a small 4 outlet chain of all-day restaurants serving predominantly British food. It’s a trendy restaurant in as much as it has a `Mission statement’, has a Facebook site and a Twitter handle. The Mission statement reads 'Canteen is committed to providing honest food, nationally sourced, skilfully prepared and reasonably priced'. I presume that in the absence of the information in the Mission Statement the food would have been dishonest, sourced from some foreign country, Outer Mongolia maybe, prepared with no skill whatsoever and sold at rapacious prices. Frankly, that is how most of the new restaurants in Mumbai operate what with New Zealand Lamb Chops et al. Anyway, despite the Mission Statement and Social Media thrust, Canteen is a good place with good food and it is indeed reasonably priced. Canteen is close to the Apartment so we popped in for a Sunday breakfast.

After the half dozen Oysters, HRH’s appetite had its edge taken off, so she said that she would like to have a Welsh Rarebit with a Poached Egg and a glass of fresh Apple juice. I ordered the Canteen `Full English’ Breakfast.

A Welsh Rarebit is a delicious open cheese toast made with an English [or Welsh] cheese like Cheddar, Double Gloucester and the like, enriched with Mustard, Beer and other ingredients. This mix is spread on toast and grilled. A poached egg sat on top. It was really very good and the egg perfectly poached. So much so that HRH asked me to keep the camera ready to take a photo of the egg oozing.

Welsh Rarebit

The Full English was a joy to behold. Such a good breakfast. I would have liked some baked beans but this was enough. Good eggs, decent bacon and a well flavoured sausage, what more could one want for breakfast?

After eating that, it was a lazy afternoon reading the very large Sunday newspapers.