In London it’s easy to forget that going out for breakfast doesn’t mean you have to find the most obscene portions, the most unusual dishes or the most Antipodean staff. Sometimes you just want something solid and unpretentious. Sometimes you don’t want orange vanilla syrup with your French toast or smoked labneh on your eggs. Sometimes, you don’t even want any mashed avocado.
By London standards, Dean Street Townhouse is practically a ’70s throwback when it comes to breakfast though, sigh, yes, they’ve snuck in an avocado option — avocado on toast with poached egg — presumably to cater for the same Observer-reading types that adopted the flat white for fear of tasting something. Mostly though, if you were playing Family Fortunes with this menu, you’d do ok. Mushrooms on toast, sausage and bacon sandwiches, every conceivable egg option including the hollandaise triumvirate, a full English, a couple of hashes, kippers. The recent and surprising addition of a Lorne sausage, tattie scone & fried egg option caused me to raise an eyebrow but I let it pass as its stodgy, Scottish nature reminded me of Taggart.
As for the establishment itself, it’s safe to say that I’m more at home there with its leather seating, bistro salt and pepper grinders and a pleasing gloom than I am sharing a galley table with a dozen strangers in a brightly-lit broom cupboard being asked if I want some bacon jam. At breakfast time the place has that quiet sleepiness you tend to get from places that have a hotel attached, plus there are seats outside to attract the more boisterous clientele and save us civilised, indoor-diners from their noise.
Service is good, the food is good and the toilets have nice soap; Dean Street Townhouse may not have sumac yoghurt as a side dish but it’s a comforting and unassuming place with no fucking around about anything. You might not be Instagramming your meal, but neither will anyone else around you, and I can think of no stronger recommendation.
Dean Street Townhouse
69 – 71 Dean Street, Soho
London, W1D 3SE
http://www.deanstreettownhouse.com