Dr HH and I had sensational big cooked breakfasts at The Breakfast Club once before, but I can’t find any photographic evidence of it. But I remember it being bigger and better than the one we received this summer. The whole place felt just slightly off since our previous visit. There are multiple branches of The Breakfast Club around the city and the one we were at on Berwick Street certainly put the “club” into the name. Even at 8:30am, the lights were so dim we had to use the torches on our phones to read the menu and the music was extremely loud. When I compared the terrible lighting evidenced in my photographs to other reviewers’ images on Happy Cow, it seems like I was in the minority with club lighting, so maybe it was just a fluke.

Anyway, the food was pretty good – I had the set veggie #2, which is basically the full English (pictured above). It only had one hash brown, which felt a bit stingy, especially when there were so many cherry tomatoes, which were wholly unremarkable for me. The mushrooms were well seasoned and it was a decent portion of those, which is always good news. The tofu scramble was very wet and bland, and a bit unpleasant, unfortunately. However, the spicy, homemade beans were good, the bacon was crispy and savoury, and the sausages were very meaty and delicious, the real highlight. No toast with this dish seems like an oversight, but it was still a decent breakfast.

And this is a blurry picture of the All American breakfast, which Dr HH tried. It shared some of the same elements as the English version (bacon, sausage, scramble – though his scramble was cold), along with some potato chunks and pancakes. The pancakes were good, and the potatoes were the highlight, very crispy and nicely seasoned. This dish combines sweet and savoury, so it’s not for everyone (and certainly not for me), but Dr HH was pretty pleased with it.

It was not quite the glorious return to The Breakfast Club that we were hoping for – the good parts were very good, but there were a couple of disappointments, the club-like atmosphere included!