Hey, guys, I'm Harry.
And I'm Ju.
And today we are on a mission to find the best
full English breakfast in London.
So what is a full English?
Well, it's supposed to be a massive breakfast
that absolutely sets you up for the day.
Harry: So what do we actually want on our plate
in the full English breakfast?
Well, we want some kind of egg whether it's
fried, or scrambled, or poached.
As long as it's cooked well, that's fine.
We want some bacon.
Ideally, I think we're looking for some nice, crispy bacon
and some sausages as well,
and then some kind of bread.
Some places toast their bread. Some places fry their bread,
but it's gotta have carbs.
Today, we're starting our journey at Billingsgate Market.
Billingsgate is an old East End fish market,
but tourists come here from all over London
to come and have a taste of their full English breakfast.
I'm hungry, are you ready to go and find out?
I'm really, really hungry.
Let's go.
So we're in the café at Billingsgate Market,
and we've just been given this absolutely massive
full English breakfast.
So I'm gonna go clockwise around the plate.
I'll start up here.
We've got a sausage. It looks like a really good sausage,
thick cut, proper pork.
We've got baked beans.
We've got the mushrooms, tomatoes,
hash browns, back bacon,
fried bread, a fried egg, and toast as well.
Where do we start?
Egg first, I think.
Egg first.
Ju: Egg first. Harry: Let's go for it.
Ju: Right. Harry: Let's go.
Mm!
Ju: It's nice. It's really light.
Harry: The fried bread is unhealthy.
That is not a diet option.
Ju: I know, this is not an option,
but to be honest, like, they've given one fried egg
on top of fried bread, and it doesn't really feel like
too heavy. Harry: No.
It's really nice and light.
Harry: We might be saying that by the end,
but we'll find out.
Ju: True, mm.
Right, let me try this bacon.
Mmmmm! Got, like,
a good amount of crisp on this.
It's full of flavor.
Yeah, that's good bacon.
But not overly salted and not too greasy either.
I like the fact that there's not a lot of fat on it.
You actually get the full flavor of the meat,
really, really good.
This is just like, I can literally see
there's just meat spilling out of it.
That is a very full sausage, I think.
I just made it something sexual!
Harry: Mmmm.
That's not bad.
It's almost like a little bit too much going on there.
It's like, Quite herby...
On the side of kind of underdone
'cause it's not like the texture's
a bit more like a sausage roll than a sausage,
if that makes sense.
Ju: Yeah. Harry: It's more like
mince packed in rather than meat itself,
but it's really tasty.
It's got all the ingredients that you'd look for
in a kind of classic English breakfast.
Maybe not the freshest ingredients,
but everything does have its place on the plate,
and it's just a lot of food for your money, which is great.
Next, we travel to Gallery Café in east London,
which serves up an all-vegan offering
of the full English breakfast.
So we've been vegan for just over a year.
We went vegan last year at the end of Veganuary,
but the café itself has been vegetarian for 25 years.
We serve a vegan full English,
which comes with a classic vegan staple,
Linda McCartney sausages with red onion and rosemary,
scrambled tofu, which is cooked with some spices,
carrots, and onions, and garlic.
Then we have wilted spinach, some pan-fried mushrooms,
comes with homemade baked beans,
which are cooked every day
over the course of about five hours.
We do get a lot of vegans travel to come here.
Sometimes we'll have people traveling here,
they'll get a bit delayed or something,
and they'll ring ahead and make sure that we've still got,
still got breakfast on.
Yeah, it's something of a destination
for vegans in London, yeah.
Ju: Well, the first thing that we can see is
this really, really vibrant plate of food.
I mean everything just like really, really
pops out color-wise.
You see the tomato, super, super red.
This amazing scrambled tofu, egg replacement,
it's just like vibrant yellow.
It looks so, so fresh and really, really good.
Harry: Also, the homemade baked beans look ridiculous,
almost more of like a stew
than what you're expecting from traditional baked beans,
so I'm really excited to see how they taste.
Oh, wow!
I think it's a really nice replacement,
like obviously it's not a true replacement for eggs
because it doesn't try and replicate the taste of egg.
It's just a nice sort of accompaniment
to the other things in the meal.
These are sort of almost like a classic
vegan-vegetarian sausage.
Like, this is obviously vegan sausage that's gonna have
some kind of meat replacement in the middle of it.
Therefore, it wouldn't be expected to have
the same kind of texture or look as a classic sausage.
Mmm.
I think compared to the meat sausage we had at Billingsgate,
I'd almost say I'd prefer this
just because it's got more flavor and the texture is,
it tastes more like a proper, like a well-cooked sausage.
So these are the homemade beans.
They make these every day.
They look and smell really good.
Whoa.
Almost like a kind of a salsa base to it.
You can really taste that there's fresh tomato in there.
The tomato really comes through
in less of a sort of like tinned,
sort of processed ways that you might have Heinz beans.
Like, this is definitely beans in a tomato sauce.
There's chunks of onion in there.
Like, it's ever so slightly red peppery as well.
It tastes really, really good.
This is like as close as to just beans and tomato
as you can get.
I would say this is just the right amount of it,
like the flavor is quite intense
in each of the ingredients,
so I wouldn't want this to be a
massive, massive plate of food.
This seems like the absolute right amount
for a proper breakfast.
Next we head to the Premises Café,
which is attached to the Premises
Rehearsal and Recording Studio.
It's been visited by popular music artists
such as Rihanna, Tom Jones, and Adele.
So this is the fried breakfast at
Premises Café in east London.
I mean, first impressions,
it's got tick, tick, tick,
all the basics of a really great
fried breakfast on the menu.
It's got fried egg in the middle. It's got some bacon.
It's got some sausage,
as well as just having real classics like
some good pieces of toast, some beans,
tomato, and a hash brown.
Mmm.
It's nice, like the egg doesn't have too much
of a hard underside to it.
It hasn't been overfried.
The yolk as soon as we cut into it
was super, super runny, which is exactly what you wanna see
in order to be able to dip in
all the other elements into it.
It's got a nice taste to it.
It's obviously like a good, fresh, well-cooked egg.
Whoa!
That's good bacon.
A danger of fry-ups, as kind of the name would signify,
is that you just fry everything
and everything comes out really greasy,
but this feels quite light almost, which is really good
because even though you've got that
layer of fat in the bacon,
there hasn't been too much extra added to it
to kind of make it heavy or too much.
Ju: Oh, wow! Harry: Mmm.
In terms of the style of sausage,
it's pretty similar to the one we had at Billingsgate,
but I gotta say, I prefer this one.
It just is kind of better, better cooked I think.
A bit more cooked all the way through.
The texture's really great,
and it's just really nicely seasoned as well.
So this entire plate of food only costs £7.95.
I would say that's really a massive bargain.
It's just, I mean forgetting the toast as well,
it's like double rashers of bacon.
You get two sausages and two fried tomatoes.
I think that's a really, really good price.
Now we travel to south east London to Terry's,
an old English café with a
post-World-War-II-London feel.
On this absolutely massive plate of food,
we've got a couple of quite new ingredients.
So the first one is bubble and squeak.
It's just this kind of mashed-potato-looking thing
over here, and what it actually is is potato and quite
traditionally like cabbage or sprouts
all kind of griddled into one
so that you get this nice sort of brown layer on top of it,
but inside should be a little bit like
a vegetably mashed potato.
It's like really kind of classic English dish.
So what we've also got here is
our first black pudding of the day.
For those of you who don't know,
black pudding is one of the least
appetizing-sounding foods in the world.
What it is is usually pig's blood
mixed with oats and some animal fat
and then put inside a casing
and kind of cooked like a sausage.
What should we go for first?
I don't know. I feel like we should try one of these.
Shall we try the bubble and squeak?
Yeah, let's go for the bubble and squeak.
Mmm. Harry: Mmm.
Yeah, I'm liking that. You get the kind of
caramelization on the outside where it browns.
So a little bit of sweetness.
The inside, I'm mostly getting the potato,
but then kind of mixed in with that
you kind of get the cabbage and whatever else is in there.
It's good!
It's like a really oaty consistency.
Like, it's really like a porridge.
It's not unlike it.
Harry: Porridge? Porridge log...
It tastes nutritious but like baked-cake porridge.
Harry: If you tried that without knowing what it was,
would you think "blood"?
No.
I mean, it tastes a little bit like sausage.
It's like oaty sausage.
So really, really nice fried egg here.
You can see that it's cooked extremely well,
and it's got this really nice sheen to it.
Got some parsley on the top,
which is just a nice little addition to it.
It's gonna give it like a little bit of a kick.
Let's try.
Not much crisp on the bottom.
Ju: Yeah.
It's not as, like, fried as I kind of thought it would.
Y'know, that association of everything kind of
having like a brownishness in it
'cause it's just been like fried for a couple of minutes.
Whereas this is just, there's like a levity to it,
like, it's just quite light,
looks like it's been extremely lightly fried.
Harry: I really want to try this sausage.
Just get a look at the size of these.
This is an entire meal in just one,
like in one forkful.
This is like a hot-dog sausage,
but it's got this amazing glisten to it.
It's just perfectly cooked.
Really, really, really tasty-looking.
Like I literally can't wait to eat this.
Harry: Mm-hm.
Mmm.
Ju: It's so super, super sweet.
It's not as herby as other sausages that we've tried today.
It's just like a very nice, sweet pork.
Like that lovely, kind of like,
almost crispiness around the outside.
Yeah, you get like the snap of the casing
when you bite into it.
That's a really good sausage.
Really good.
And now we'll try some of this bacon under here.
It looks great, lovely color on the bacon,
three rashers as well.
That's a lot of bacon.
Ju: That's a lot of bacon.
Harry: They've not messed around on the bacon,
which I love to see. Ju: Yeah.
Harry: It's quite a thick cut of bacon. I'm getting like...
We both kind of chewed for a quite while
when we bit into that.
It's kind of almost towards that gammon-ham
sort of texture that you're more used to
but with the sort of saltiness and
a little bit of crisp from the bacon.
Really good.
We move on to our final stop, The Breakfast Club,
a chain restaurant that specializes in serving
all-day brunch in a retro setting.
So we have an absolutely massive pile of food here.
There's a lot of hidden ingredients on this plate
that have really piled up.
So we've got some mushrooms 'round the back.
We've got a nice little tin of beans here.
It's like in its own little cup.
We've got some really good-looking,
streaky rashers of bacon,
and we've got some sausage in here, black pudding.
We've got some little, tiny potatoes
and then two really, really nicely toasted
bits of toast with some butter on the side.
And these eggs almost look like model eggs.
They look like too good to be, like, real.
These are like cartoon-film eggs.
Yeah! - These are very picturesque.
It all looks really good.
Ooh!
Hmmm!
It's like the yolk is almost
an absolute perfect color and texture.
You ideally want an egg which is just gonna like
run everywhere, and you can have things mopping up into it,
and this absolutely fits the bill.
And it's not, the underside of it as well
is just kind of like perfectly round.
It's a good, a good egg.
So now we've got this delicious bacon.
Hmm.
Not bad.
It's a lot thicker than I thought it would be.
It's like a lot to get through.
No, that's good.
Could maybe do with a little bit more crisp?
Ju: Right, black pudding. Harry: Mm-hm.
Ju: Mmm.
Harry: Hmm, OK.
It's more moist than the other one we had before,
which is quite nice because the other one kind of dried
your mouth out a little bit.
Maybe not quite as flavorful as Terry's.
No.
But it's, yeah, definitely, definitely a better texture.
Hmm, for sure.
OK, sausage.
Cut you off a slice.
Ooh.
There's a different flavor to the one we had before.
Smoky! Mm.
What we've had earlier in the day tend to be quite like
herby and a little bit more Cumberland sort of sausage,
whereas this has more of like an American sausage,
like, or even dare I say like German sausage,
like, smokiness to it?
Yeah, for sure I'm getting the smoked flavors.
Spiced a little bit differently compared to the sort of,
the Cumberland sausages that we've had throughout the day,
which may be a more traditional English option.
Yeah.
But this is quite nice. I like the smoke addition.
Yeah.
OK, so we've had some time to think about it.
We're stood here outside of Tower Bridge,
and it is time to pick our favorite
out of all the five places for a full English breakfast
that we visited on our journey.
Reveal on three?
OK.
One, two, three.
Terry's.
Premises Café!
Oh!
Disagreed again. Disagreed, disagreed.
OK, so explain to me why you think
Premises was better than Terry's.
So Premises was my favorite for a few reasons.
The breakfast itself obviously
had all the kind of key components.
It had that fresh egg, really tasty sausage,
bacon, beans, so really good full English itself.
So I picked Terry's because
I thought the standard of the food was exceptionally high.
We got this absolutely massive pork sausage.
You've got several rashers of bacon.
Their eggs were really fantastic.
I thought overall it was just a really, really photogenic
full-English-breakfast experience.
It looked so perfect on the plate,
and you get this sort of south London,
sort of that area of Southwark,
that full-English-breakfast experience.
I guess for the same reason we like the atmosphere
as well as the food.
But are you willing to come over to Terry's?
You know, there wasn't enough in it for me
between Premises and Terry's for me to stick with Premises.
I think I would agree that Terry's
was one of the best that we had, if not my favorite.
So I think I'm gonna join you.
We've got to pick our favorite overall.