Blueberry Cafe

When we first came (back) to Chiswick to sign the lease on our flat, I noticed that between here and Turnham Green, there are at least 5 cafes that each offer some form of breakfast for £5 or less. Helllloooo… do I hear a challenge in the making? Yes I do!

Enter: The £5 breakfast challenge. Yes, it’s an extremely creative name, and I laboured over it until I was happy. I was also considering dropping the pound sign, and instead going for “The five pound breakfast challenge”, because I’m using a US keyboard and I don’t have a convenient button for “£”. However, I felt that our dear American readers may think I’m trying to eat five pounds of breakfast foods, rather than spending five pounds on breakfast. It’s an important distinction.

Anyway – the first cafe to unknowingly step up to the plate was the Blueberry Cafe. From the outside, it definitely looks like the swankiest of them all, but a rather unfortunately placed red statue blocks its view of the high rode. (Note: it may look like a mail box, however Royal Mail are on strike these days more often than not, so it doesn’t work like a mail box).

Blueberry’s £5 breakfast comes with two fried eggs, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, baked beans, and two pieces of wholegrain toast. Kristy and I both liked that wholegrain was the default bread – given the option of white, we both probably would have taken it, yet the wholegrain was delicious and nutritious! Still, some options would have been nice – I’m not really a bacon person, and would have preferred to swap out my rashers for sausages if I could have; and I love me some breakfast tomato.

A few points off for not offering any beverage with the meal – we each ordered a freshly squeezed OJ, which we felt was a decent size, and fairly good value for money. I also ordered a latte, which unfortunately was about the size of a child’s beach bucket, and far, far too hot for my liking.

The addition of three beverages to our meal drove the cost up to around £16, however I figured that if you’re going to go somewhere for breakfast, you’re likely to want at least one accompanying beverage, so they should be part of the review.

Blueberry suffers from “the first cab off the rank” syndrome – once we’ve been to each of the cafes, it may on reflection be the best, but until that point we can only rate it on its lonesome. The food was definitely well prepared, and high quality, but not quite enough variety to bring home the proverbial bacon. gerrod.com rating: 8/10.