Comparing inexpensive versus expensive breakfasts....
 

MODERATOR'S NOTE: These posts were split off of http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/dinin...estaurant.html into their own thread since they were not on-topic for that one.

Civility and good-naturedness are still expected :) And let's not try to argue that someone's tastes are "wrong." Thank you.

Yup, I sure miss sliding off the plastic seats because of that film of grease covering every surface, the sausage " meat " that tastes of a school chemistry lesson, the bacon the looks and tastes like cardboard.

This, however, is a proper breakfast.

http://www.simpsonsinthestrand.co.uk/menus.php?id=1

Full English is a great breakfast but I've never understood why tomatoes are part of it. Wouldn't some sort of potato fit better with the rest?

I counter your Simpsons with Colby's in Portsmouth NH, but I can't post a link because I am iPhonically challenged

Holy cowpies! The prices! Is that, like, the caffeteria at Buckinham Palace or something?

Tomatoes are common ingredients in American omelettes, and it's fairly common to see sliced tomato on fried egg sandwiches, not to mention the old classic BLT. With the Central and South American culinary influence increasing in the US every year, salsas are becoming more common in American breakfast foods, as well.

£20? For breakfast? Does it come on gold plates, served by Playboy bunnies?

if you don't spend much money on food then more than likely it's not going to be of good quality.
I'd quite happily spend £20 on a great breakfast in a magnificent dining room in much the same way as some people think nothing of spending a hundred dollars on dinner.

I've never been much for ambiance, and would rather not pay for the magnificent dining room regardless of the meal.

Having been catching up on this thread missing yesterday, I was not sure what constitutes a "great breakfast" that would justify a $20 charge, just on the food (going on the theory that everything in the UK costs roughly what it does in the US, but in GBP rather than USD)... I've paid $20+ for breakfast a few times as a matter of convenience (and a couple times had it included in a hotel rate where paying otherwise would have been pricier than that), but I can't say I've ever had the food justify the cost increase over a $9 breakfast at a good local diner, and in many cases I'd have been happier with a $4 "Everyday Value Slam" Denny's or the $4 "big breakfast" at McDonalds. There are only so many ways to cook scrambled eggs, and most of them make them worse than the really simple ones.

$100 on dinner is (typically) going to be very different food than a $20 dinner. In cases where a $20 or $40 buffet is very different food than the diner breakfast, it's probably stuff I don't want to even think about at 9am.

That is at least a rather impressive array of meat for your £20; not what I'd normally want for breakfast -- but it might well be interesting to try it, once. Just, as with just about any food in the UK, best to think about £1 as $1 and not of the exchange rate.

http://www.urbanspoon.com/cities/233...ast-lunch/menu

Looks like my kind of place.

My own local breakfast of choice:
http://restaurantbaywatch.com/pages/menu1.html

Nail on the head.

I suppose it depends how much you value what goes into your body and from what I've seen on my many visits to the States most people don't seem to care what and how much bad food they eat.

Personally I think a breakfast comprising Cumberland sausage ( that's whole sausages made from good quality prime meat cuts and not patties made from what's left on the floor of the abattoir ), proper bacon and not pork belly, Stornoway Black Pudding, fried mushrooms,baked tomatoes and free-range eggs - plus toast,pastries,juice and fresh coffee all for £20 represents excellent value for money

And Simpsons-in-the Strand is an iconic London restaurant that has played hosts to diners including Vincent Van Gogh, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone.

Yes you can find it cheaper and quicker at the Golden Arches if that's all the time and money you can afford on one of life's great pleasures but I know which I'd choose any day.

Cured pork belly /is/ proper bacon on this side of the Atlantic, and while the cheap oscar-meyer-ish stuff you'll find at Denny's or similar places is decidedly so-so (and no bacon at all is to be found on the "big breakfast" platter at McDonalds) really good American bacon is not hard to find and every bit as good as any back bacon.

As I said, the range of meat available does sound like a pretty good value once you account for the dollars-pounds issue. Rather a heavy breakfast for my taste, but a good value.

Some people like to pay for ambiance, some don't. Some will find the history more interesting; some don't.

If breakfast is one of life's great pleasures for you, by all means, enjoy. For me, it tends to be a sign that I'm up too early and is a necessary evil to carry me over until lunch.

You know the old saying - breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.
I tend to use Simpsons for breakfast on special occasions - either having been up all night carousing or lining the stomach with a solid base for a long day of imbibing ahead.
Normally I'm a cup of Joe and slice of toast and Marmite man.

But you won't get good quality eggs to make those scrambled eggs with. They'll be pale yellow, not bright golden and rich with flavour, from battery hens, not free range. Your sausage will be filled with filler and cereals. Your bacon will have been injected with water to bulk it up. In other words, if you eat a $4 breakfast, you'll be served the cheapest crap imaginable because they can't afford to serve high quality food for that and make a profit.

While I'm with the £20 is too much crowd - I think you are paying a surcharge for the place, not the food - for a good quality English/Scottish breakfast (the Scottish has a few other interesting items on it like haggis, tattie scones and clootie dumpling) I'd happily pay over a tenner if I knew they were using the best of ingredients, not the worst. Breakfast is a speciality of my house - I work hard to source good quality ingredients, particularly sausage and black pudding, usually getting them from the local farmers market because they make such a difference to the quality of the breakfast.

If you can't taste the difference between good and bad eggs, or other breakfast items, then please feel free to enjoy your $4 breakfast. But please don't tell those of us who are able to detect a difference that there is no difference :(

No, I've never run across it, although google shows that it's out there.

A higher price is hardly any guarantee of anything different, although one might be getting better at any specific instance.

From what I can tell, there's little correlation in many cases in the US between price and the quality -- mainly freshness -- of eggs, and I've been more frequently disappointed by overpriced breakfasts at hotels than inexpensive breakfasts at diners. Nor at the local batch of fancified breakfast places can I tell the difference in the eggs.

Nor, cooking breakfast at home, have I seen a difference in taste between the cage-free organic eggs and the cheap supermarket brands. Around here in California, they're all trucked in and kind of meh. When I was in a more rural area for college (nearly 20 years ago) even the cheap supermarket ones were better than we get here, or than I was able to get as a kid in NYC.

None used on the posted ingredients of the McDonald's sausage patty, and given the scrutiny they get about ingredients, I'd expect that to be legit. Sugar and preservatives and undoubtedly a very cheap grade of ground pork.

Wouldn't that just cook off, regardless? Especially given the tendency of a lot of places here to cook bacon utterly to death.

I can definitely tell the difference between good and bad bacon, but tend to have better luck with bacon in sandwiches or on hamburgers than on even the priciest of breakfasts I've been exposed to.

Which sums up most of the reasons why the US is currently suffering from such an enormous obesity crisis.

Cheap, poor quality food and lots of it.

Nor, cooking breakfast at home, have I seen a difference in taste between the cage-free organic eggs and the cheap supermarket brands.


If you can't see and taste the difference between a free-range egg and one from a battery chicken it's really not surprising you consider McDonalds to be fine purveyors of breakfast repast.

cage-free and organic have nothing to do with (and have no impact on) taste.

In much the same way as farmed salmon tastes exactly the same as wild salmon ?

Or indeed a battery chicken tastes exactly the same as a chicken allowed to roam free ?

:rolleyes:

I know we have gone wildly OT here, but I will say that, ever since I discovered the farmers' markets, and what I call "real" eggs, we can't go back to grocery store eggs (even the organic, cage free variety). I have no idea what the difference is, but the eggs we get at the farmers' market are almost orange, they are buttery in texture and taste, and just the yum. Totally worth the extra trip.

Carry on.

Cage free versus battery can be massive. And it depends on whether the chickens are allowed outside to roam (as I said, free range) or whether they are barn chickens, who are kept inside. Free range find their own food, barn are better from a welfare point of view but are being fed on what battery chickens are.

I buy supermarket eggs out of necessity, and buy better welfare ones. But for taste, as ysolde highlights, get ye to a farmer's market or farm shop and buy some eggs from chickens which wander, find their own food. The yolks are vibrant and they taste of eggs. You can tell the difference, even if you don't know where the eggs came from (I went out for breakfast with friends at the weekend and their poached eggs were sourced well - a dark intense gold, and tasting so yum).

We did come close to walking out the restaurant because they said there would be a 20 min wait for a table.. but I'm glad we didn't. All around good breakfast. I also don't recall having walked out once food has arrived, but I have left a restaurant when they kept us waiting too long for the order to be taken.

+1. I only buy my eggs at the Santa Monica Farmer's Mkt. There is always a line for Mike's Eggs and for good reason. They are the freshest, most delicious eggs I have ever tasted. The shells are so thin that they are almost translucent. The yolks are a bright orange. They cook in a matter of seconds.

Exactamundo. OTOH, the choice you have at the supermarket is pretty much between house-brand conventional eggs, name-brand conventional eggs, and name-brand cage-free/organic/etc eggs.

AFAICT, the way to get the best eggs among them is to look at the packed-on date (if it has one, going for the most recent) or the sell-by date if it doesn't (going for the latest.)

As far as I can tell, actual free range eggs are not regularly available at a regular retail store near me, even at Whole Paycheck, nor have I seen eggs at the nearest couple of farmer's markets. I don't doubt farmer's market eggs will be better; as I said, the supermarket eggs were better near where I went to school.

I've had good free range chicken (and some awfully gamey free-range chicken, especially in certain parts of SE Asia -- I'm told but cannot confirm that it's because outside of Halal meat, it's not conventional to bleed the bird fully before butchering) and some free range chicken which was indistinguishable from very cheap conventional. I've also had some very good conventional chicken, which was not marketed as "free range."

So it goes. There's great beef out there and cruddy beef out there, and while grass-fed, corn-finished, or full-on corn-fed/feedlot beef produces a different flavor in each case, all three of those are available in ranges from great to cruddy.

Back on subject a bit....

I have two places I frequent 5-6 days a week for breakfast. One is a local luncheonette counter that fries eggs on a grill, the other is the main dining room of a five-star hotel. Both offer me something the other doesn't, and I enjoy them equally.

The first gives me cheap, greasy, and delicious standards I grew up on with coffee that I've used to clean scratches off my car in a pinch. I've never paid more than $12 for a couple of egg sandwiches, coffee, juice, and a short stack of pancakes. I've also never been in there for more than 20 minutes at a time.

The second provides a luxurious setting for entertaining, reading, relaxing, making phone calls, and simply enjoying the morning. When I walk in there is a stack of six local, national, and international newspapers at my table, at an approximate value of $20 in total. The coffee is from a local purveyor, served in fine china, and the menu offers interesting and healthier fare such as Chinese and Japanese speciality breakfasts, five kinds of local sausage, and so on. The average cost for breakfast is around $30-35, or ~20GBP. Is it worth it? Yes, for what it is. Assuming I sit for two hours, and the food should probably cost 2/3 of what I'm paying for it without a hotel mark-up, I just look at the additional $10-15 either way as a cover charge for the perfect service and additional amenities included.

Overall, it just depends on what role breakfast, and for that matter, what any meal, serves in your day.

Well said.
Sometimes a greasy spoon is the only thing that will hit the mark.
Especially on hangover mornings.:D

I guess it depends on the supermarket and the country/area in that case. There have been huge campaigns in the UK against battery farming, and the number of suppliers, not only of chicken products, but also of derived products (e.g. Mayonnaise) who have responded to this is huge. As a result, there is a new, widespread awareness of chicken rearing methods.

Free range (rather than barn-raised) eggs are commonplace in mos supermarkets. Some (e.g. Waitrose/Ocado) stock single and rare breed eggs as well. And yes, you can genuinely taste the difference. It's not like local small-scale suppliers (round here it tends to be small farmhouses with signs up in particular seasons, and honesty boxes half the time) but there's still a world of difference from the cheapie ones.

For example:

http://www.ocado.com/webshop/getSear...ree+range+eggs

I'm no great chef, but I can cook/acquire a better breakfast than what I'd usually order. There is little sense of a "value for money." Eg: I can buy top notch pancake mix and maple syrup that would last me for quite some time at under $20. Eggs and bacon are just plain easy to cook. Bread and bagels can be bought down the street for an insignificant cost.

Now brunch. Oh my.... That's a whole different kettle of fish. :D I can't wait till I am in Hong Kong next month for the Intercontinental's feast.

Expensive breakfasts have been hit or miss in my experience. Occasionally, it is readily apparent that they are making everything in house by the taste and texture. Quite often, it is equally clear that they are buying in lots of things pre-made. I like eggs benedict when I go to a nicer place for breakfast. Something as simple as a poached egg seems to really mess up a lot of restaurants. Hollandaise is another tough one for some reason.

Cheap breakfast can be just as good or bad. For example, in the US south, a plate of scratch made biscuits and gravy will be delicious and cheap.

My digestive system doesn't like to have much if a challenge until I've been vertical for a couple hours, so I tend to be rather hit or miss about breakfast in general, and a 'huge breakfast' for me is a medium-sized bagel with cream cheese and a Diet Coke. I've also got a lifelong aversion to cooked eggs unless they're hidden in something like a meringue pie, so fancy breakfast is utterly wasted on me.

A lot of US States have very tight legal definitions of what can be called a meat sausage or hot dog. Used to have an uncle in Big Food and there were enough states that required only meat + spices and preservatives that it wasn't worth it for them financially to run a different production line that had sausages with cheaper filler ingredients in them and ship them to states with lesser rules.

The American fast food restaurants probably just stick with the strictest state product requirements in the name of consistency from franchise to franchise. It's not necessarily high quality pork, but your McDonald's or Burger King breakfast sandwich is going to be 99% pork by weight.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing!

Breakfast is psychologically interesting. People have strong feelings about it, which may not match their feelings about any other meal. I think it's almost always, to some extent, comfort food -- if you're having a hot meal then it's fatty and salty and filling, and we very rarely stray from the five or six different things we learned were "breakfast" foods when we were kids.

Breakfast is intrinsically pretty unadventurous. Eating something that isn't a "breakfast" food is impossibly daring. Spending more than twenty dollars is impossibly extravagant.

I only eat bagels and biscuits made with free-range wheat, not the stuff that is grown in rows on a farm.

You can taste the difference.

I don't know, those usually taste gamy to me.

As one who eats breakfast out at least 10 times as often as dinner, $10-13 is the sweet spot for a really good breakfast, and that usually means eggs Benedict or a really special omelet. I have never once had better by spending more, and $6-7 is fine for a simple plate of eggs, potatoes, and meat at Denny's or most any typical breakfast haunt. The $25-50 brunch buffets can be good, but for breakfast I generally don't want the prime rib/seafood/vast multitude of items that makes them expensive.

I was one of the first in the original thread to express shock at the idea of a 20-pound breakfast (sorry, American on an American keyboard, dunno how to make the GBP sign).

But I'd like to clarify something - It's not the fact that it's breakfast that threw me off; it's just that 20 quid is a very expensive meal, be it B, L, or D.

However, a gourmet meal, made in a 5-star restaurant by a master chef, is certainly worth more money than a mass-produced meal in a chain restaurant. Had I the means, I would certainly enjoy such meals on a regular basis, but as a middle-class working stiff, I cannot justify the expense of such indulgences, when I can get an acceptable (though inferior) meal for less than 1/4 of the price.

I have never had a problem with the concept of pay more, get more. So long as I am getting value for my money, either in larger quantities or higher qualities, or some other added factor like ambience, location, some sort of show, or an unusual level of service, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to spend more money when it's within one's budget.

If I'm ever in London, and my budget can handle it, I might consider laying down a twenty for breakfast at Simpons on the Strand. Assuming, of course, that they'd be willing to admit an uncultured Yank such as myself. :cool:

in the 5* french and italian hotels breakfast is at least 50 euro, on the way to 60. i have seen people "pop" in, get a coffee, and go. 50 euro!!!

No kidding, outrageous hotel breakfast charges are out of control right now. Just checked one place I stay frequently and the price with breakfast is $42 more.

And at the other end of the spectrum are the high-end four and five star Asian hotels where a breakfast (particularly a buffet) can be a phenomenal value for what is offered.

Given the GBP#1 is equivalent to US$1 in costs on the ground there, it doesn't seem that expensive in that sense; I've had plenty of $20 lunches at nicer places. $32 USD (errr, $30.32 per google... dang, time to visit the UK again) is a pricier meal, but I've had plenty of casual dining meals where my share was about that after tax and tip, and that's often less than an entree at fancier places (before drinks, share of an appetizer if any, and the tendency of fine dining to make sides separate, let alone tax and tip)... almost always for places by good beef.

See, I can't see for breakfast what a master chef can add. For meals where I'd be more inclined to try interesting and different food, sure. For one of the same handful of breakfast orders where I want them the way I want them, rather than a chef's vision of them, paying for a fancy place and a master chef is rather likely to eff them up.

Same reason why I don't eat mac'n'cheese at any restaurant (I'm sorry, I've got a recipe for doing it at home that suits my tastes exactly and is dead easy) and I no longer eat hamburgers at any fancified restaurant which tries to charge more for them a regular burger joint; anything they could do to justify the higher price almost certainly consists of effing-it-up.

Lunch or dinner there looks much more interesting, IMO.

I've seen a couple of posts mentioning equivalency between pounds and dollars, but I'm not sure I understand.

At today's exchange rate, 1 pound is equal to $1.51. 20 pounds, then, is $30.18, which is a lot of money for a meal. I've spent that much on meals before, but I still consider it a lot, at least by my standards.

As to "effing" things up, well, if that's the way you feel about world-class chefs, that's your opinion. I have never personally eaten food prepared by one of those guys, but I have eaten at enough cheap places, chain restaurants, and mid-level restaurants to know that there is a difference in the quality of the food as you go from one level to another. A burger at G&M Seafood near BWI is going to beat the socks off a burger from the neighborhood sub shop down the street, and I don't doubt for a moment that a burger from one of the better restaurants in New York or even London will beat G&M.

Nothing beats G&M's Maryland style crab cakes, though. Nobody outside Maryland does maryland style foods right, except the rare Maryland transplant.

If I go out for dinner by myself, in a standard generic chain pizza place, I'd be really unlikely to get of there with a bill less than £15. We went out for breakfast/brunch recently in a nicer end restaurant in Edinburgh, and I think we were just under £15 a head. At Little Chef - the closest thing we have to Denny's - we'd be about £10. Hence why the comparison that £1 = $1 The exchange rate has nothing to do with it, eating out is more expensive in the UK such that every £1 spent on food in the UK is the equivalent of $1 spent in the US.

So £20 for breakfast in a well known relatively high end restaurant, if they are using prime ingredients is not too much of a stretch in the UK. I do think that that £5 extra is about the restaurant name though, but if you are prepared to pay it, you are prepared to pay it.

At the other end of the scale are the £20 generic chain hotel breakfasts. Buffet breakfasts with a buffet full of poor quality items - which in fairness are usually not cooked too badly, but where the bacon, black pudding and sausage is poor quality nasty rubbish (still edible and enjoyable though :o ) the mushrooms are tinned, the scrambled eggs are powdered, and the hash browns are frozen. Toast comes out of one of those awful machines where you have to hover to get them out at the other end, the butter is rock solid and the bread for the toast is the cheapest sliced cotton wool bread imaginable. The choice of fruit juice selection is orange or apple, and the glasses are the smallest thimbles in the world.

Those places are hell. You only eat there if it's included in the price, or you are hungover.

I wouldn't call a place like that hell, and I've certainly eaten comparable breakfasts in the cheaper US hotel chains (when they were included in the price of the room), but there's no way I'd pay 20 bucks for one. It's edible, sometimes it's even enjoyable, but there's no way it's worth 20 bucks.

By the way, what's black pudding?

ahhhh ahhhhh full scottish breakfast i see! I wouldnt mind one once in a blue moon, yes its a lot of money; but given that it's Strand (let's compare it to 5th Ave, NYC) using real ingredients (Yes cumberland sausages and proper eggs and bacon I'm pointing at you) - fair deal.

I skip breakfast all the time (or eat sth hardly substantial) but compared to a full brunch buffet in 5* asian hotels as noted, I'd rather get this!

and yes, organic/free-range food do taste different - whether or not you can do it depends on your taste buds and the cooking. a good friend of mine sheepishly admitted to that after being presented with the top produce cooked right after saying it's nonsense for 2-3 years.

My experience visiting the UK (a frequent visitor 10-12 years ago, and an infrequent one since) is that "assume prices there are the same as in a similar part of the US, if you just substitute GBP for USD" is a safe rule of thumb to avoid either sticker shock or over-paying.

It depends very much on the dish; there are things where innovation is welcome, and there are foods I want to be cooked competently to my own specification, and innovation is decidedly not welcome. In many cases, you pay a world-class chef for the innovation, not just the execution.

Sure, although it rarely correlates exactly with cost; I'll put a $7 (sans sides) burger at the best of my local places (Jeffrey's in San Mateo -- they have another one in Menlo Park) against any burger at any price anywhere. Just about ANY local burger place will beat the pants off of the $10 burgers at any of the mid-price casual chain places (Outback, TGIF, Chilis.)

Further, for some foods, "better ingredients" isn't always better. I've had a several burgers made with wagyu (including in Japan -- all except the first on someone else's dime)...which I love for things it's appropriate for. It's an AWFUL beef to use for a burger; it's not firm enough, and too fatty -- you lose most of the flavor benefits of the wagyu if you cook it well done (not an option where I had it in Japan, not speaking the language and not wanting to ask my host to translate) and when I didn't (either with the language barrier or because I was told "the reason it was bad last time was you got it well done" here)... you've got an underdone and mushy burger.

Whenever I've had a burger at a place like that, the burden of having to justify the $15-$20 price for a burger had entailed elaborations that leave the burger ruined, rather than improved. Could be wrong about that being a general trend, but it's been my experience.