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Breakfast at Simpson's
In the 1980s, alongside the kiwi-with- everything school of vulgarised nouvelle cuisine (the sort that flourished here), there were chefs fanning out strips of roast beef, baking miniature Yorkshire puddings, dotting the plate with peas and making lat- tice-work designs with the gravy. More recently, while robust pseudo-peasant cooking from Italy still, it would seem, holds sway, restaurateurs can be found ply- ing steak pies and suet puds, and hoping that dumplings may soon gain the cachet of polenta.
These days, in fact, there has even been some measure of success. By this I mean that fashionable restaurants demonstrate their fashionableness by the very inclusion of, as it were, unfashionable dishes. Thus the Ivy has its fish and chips and mushy peas, Quaglino's its prawn cocktail, and Simon Hopkinson at Bibendum his mash. The French, who set themselves up as arbiters of such matters, would even• seem to concede some ground: one of the most talked-about restaurants in Paris at the moment is an English one, Bertie's, which I can't quite convince myself is worth the visit. But some measure of success is noth- ing to boast about. As in just about every- thing else, we end up as the also-rans. Where restaurants have been going wrong is not exactly in cooking the wrong food, but cooking the wrong meal. We can do a decent lunch or dinner, but we do breakfast better than anyone. Fashionableness doesn't enter into it; it doesn't have to.
Simpson's-in-the-Strand, which up till now has done a masterly job of convincing its English clientele that it is the epitome of the worthily unfashionable (a gentleman's club of which you need not be a member to join) while at the same time ushering in quietly and effectively great revenue-boost- ing numbers of American tourists, has just started serving breakfast. Since, having had a baby, I am now actually up for breakfast, I thought I should celebrate my return to these pages by trying it out. In the weeks to come I might manage lunch and — who knows? — even graduate to going out in the evening for dinner.
On the back of the breakfast menu, under the legend 'Simpson's-in-the Strand, the Famous Old English Eating House', is a cartoon depicting 'An Alarming Situation — The Gentleman who asked for a conti- nental breakfast at Simpson's!' This is acceptably self-conscious. Menus under the headings 'The great British breakfast' and `The ten deadly sins' are not. The former is rather British Rail in tone and the latter seems to imply a certain boastful and self- congratulatory archness about dishing up what its detractors call heart-attack-on-a- plate. You have to do this thing straight or not at all, I think. Still, the last time I ate breakfast in a restaurant scrambled eggs made with the whites only and yellowed by turmeric (cholesterol-free and perfectly vile) were on the menu to please the Amer- icans; on the whole I prefer the Simpson's concession to transatlantic sensibilities.
A full confession of those ten deadly sins, pleasurably committed, includes sausage (listed as The Simpson's Sausage, another if slight infelicity), fried egg, bacon, black pudding, lamb's kidney, fried bread, bub- ble-and-squeak, baked beans, lamb's liver, fried mushrooms and tomatoes (the last two items being seen fit to comprise just one sin between them). All on one plate. And afterwards some stewed fruit which, actually, apart from the prunes, was not quite stewed nor quite ripe, and a croissant of almost celestial butteriness and featheri- ness. I regret not the quantity but the vari- ety. With 11 different things to eat on one plate, the possible permutations of each forkful are just too mind-racking to con- template. But then I am someone in whom just the word 'buffet' all but induces a ner- vous breakdown. Too much choice inter- feres with the appetite, though it certainly satisfies it, and, for £10, extremely cost- effectively. I couldn't eat a thing after- wards, or not until nine at night. And, con- sidering I am feeding someone else at the moment, I think it's fair to claim it's enough to keep two people going all day.
Those who are simply consuming food rather than also producing it may be satis- fied with less. York ham — pink, sweet and salty — came in large, plate-spanning slices; kippers were soft and delicately fleshed under their bronze and grill-blis- tered skin; fishcakes were on the potatoey side, though still elegantly substantial; a markedly less familiar breakfast dish is the pig's nose with parsley and onion sauce. This is not pig's nose in a metaphorical sense, as in parson's nose, but the real thing: a fatty, cartilaginous, glutinous snout on the plate, with bristles curling around each nostril. The trouble is you have to work to get anywhere. But if you can put up with digging through the flaccid goo for a few gobbets of silky, tender, beautifully aromatic ham, and think you will enjoy the horror on your companion's face as you do so, then the nose is to be recommended.
Breakfast for four of us came to £45. They stop serving it at 12, so if you want the best-value lunch in town and are prepared to eat unfashionably early, you could always book a table for 11.30, even if they're still waiting for the drinks licence.
Simpson's-in-the-Strand, 100 The Strand, London WC2 (breakfast 7 a.m.-12 noon); tel.- 071-836 9112.
Nigella Lawson
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