Breakfast at The Walpole
With apologies to the London Review of Breakfasts.
The Walpole is a fixture of the road to South Ealing. Wandering down from the bustle of Ealing Broadway, one passes Ealing Studios, the YMCA and eventually a row of shops, concealing this atypical cafe in its midst. Cafe by day, restaurant by night – does it have a split personality or ideas above its station? Who knows apart from its occasional customer? The opening hours are seemingly designed to minimise the numbers walking through the door, shunning weekends and only operating when the local inhabitants are locked in their cubes or sitting in the cattle truck rumbling citywards.
Wandering back from an early appointment to a day of working from home, I decided to have a quick pitstop and partake of their breakfast. The restaurant, for cafe is a term that barely scratches the surface, is decked out to inspire nostalgia – a no smoking sign hangs next to a tin advert for Golden Leaf, the tables are spread with sheets of brown paper and if the smoking ban hadn’t come in then you can be certain that there would be a blue cloud circulating about the eaves. The menu is simple – minimal set breakfasts and customisable items ready to construct the breakfast of your choice. I go for the simple – the normal set breakfast. The big set breakfast includes bubble, squeak , an extra sausage and beans, but now is not the time to load myself down with that many carbohydrates, for a day of sitting still at the kitchen table, pecking away at a laptop, awaits. I report to the counter, for there is no waiter ordering service here, and ask to exchange the mushrooms and sliced tomatoes (for I am a misguided soul who enjoys neither, although I am working on my lack of taste by trying them often. Not on this day, though). I am offered beans, for the standard set breakfast surprisingly does not include them, and accept gladly. Nescafe, listed as such on the menu, is included as standard and soon a steaming plate is delivered to my table.
The plate is well stacked – a sea of beans swims beneath a shiny sausage, a perfectly fried egg, two slices of well grilled bacon and glorious looking buttered toast. The plate is hot enough to soften the cutlery, as I rest it against the plate during a pause in my explorations, and the hairs on my hands curl as I examine my fare more closely. The egg is perfect – the yolk perfectly runny, the white solid but not rubbery, but the excellence ends here. The sausage is perfectly cooked on the top, but rolling it ones sees the raw underside, pink but cooked in the manner of the precooked beast; the bacon is a strange animal, dried to a crisp on one side, but soft and chewy on the other – tastily salty but neither fish nor fowl; the toast is thick cut and cheap with copious tasty butter, but it fails due to the heel of the load being included on my plate – not the most appetising of sections on a regular presliced loaf. But the most upsetting piece of my breakfast was the beans. I am a fan of the humble baked bean, championing their cause when so many talk about the ‘drowning’ of a cooked breakfast in their tomatoey sea. For the first time ever, I found my breakfast overly swimming in beany goodness, proving that my oft raised shouts against the possibility of ‘too much of a good thing’ were merely the cries of an inexperienced breakfaster.
However, these complaints are telling in one main way – they expect a perfection that you would not generally find in a cafe, justified by the heavy pricing of the posh breakfast joint. However, despite its decor and promotion to fine dining establishment of an evening, this is still at heart an honest cafe and the fare is tasty, filling and comes in at a mere £5 – expensive in some areas, but a steal in upmarket Ealing. If they were open at weekends then I feel that I would become known to the shouty chef and his long suffering minions, but as they are not they will remain an occasional pleasure for now, exercisable on those rare days when I too am not locked away in my cube or squeezed in with the rest of the cattle and bound for The City, and a more expensive breakfast.
Photo by Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
Edit: It seems that they are open on Saturdays – I stand corrected and next weekend will sit and eat.
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Posted: January 15th, 2009 under blog.