Name: Fiena Café
Address: 4, Medway Court, Judd St, London, WC1H 9QX, GB
Telephone: 020 4618 6314
Rating: 3.1

United Kingdom

Greater London

London Borough of Camden

Fiena Café

Bacon, sausages, eggs, grilled tomato, mushrooms, baked beans, black pudding and toast or fried bread, all on one plate with a pot of tea: the full English breakfast is less a recipe than a roll call, and every café, hotel and household argues about which members are compulsory. The form took shape in the country houses of the Victorian era, where the breakfast sideboard was a display of wealth, and it was carried into the twentieth century by railway hotels and then by the working-class caff, where it became a cheap, filling start to a shift. Scotland adds tattie scones and sometimes haggis, Ireland white pudding and soda bread, Wales laverbread and cockles, and the Ulster fry has its own rules. The phrase full English on a menu means all of it; a plate missing black pudding or beans is a partial English and should be sold as one.

Nothing on the plate is difficult and everything on it is easy to do badly, because it is eight things that finish at different times. The bacon is back bacon, grilled or fried until the fat is rendered and the edge crisp while the eye stays tender; the sausages are pork, cooked slowly so they brown all round without splitting; the eggs are fried in the bacon fat to a set white and runny yolk, or scrambled soft or poached; the tomato is halved and grilled until it slumps; the mushrooms are fried in butter until they stop releasing water; the beans are heated, not boiled to a paste; the black pudding is sliced thick and fried until the edges crisp; the toast is made last and buttered hot. Fried bread, cooked in the pan fat until golden on both sides, is the traditional carbohydrate and the one most often skipped. HP or ketchup go on the table, not the plate.

Judge the components one at a time and then the plate. Mark up bacon with crisp fat and no grey water, sausages with a snap and some coarse texture, eggs with unbroken yolks, mushrooms that are browned rather than boiled, and toast that is still warm. Mark down a plate assembled from a hot cabinet, watery tomato, beans flooding into the eggs, pale sausages that taste mainly of rusk, bacon that is soft and pink, cold toast, and anything fried in old oil. Portions are not the point; a plate with six good things beats one with ten tired ones. The tea should be strong and in a pot. A breakfast that arrives all hot at the same time is the mark of a kitchen that has timed it, which is the whole skill.

English breakfast

I really don’t get the idea behind this breakfast. There is no match at all.

Beans were sweet that was strange to me.
Sausage was fine but i had better ones.
Eggs, mushrooms and potatoes were undercooked.



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