My first "English" breakfast

OK, don't know how to rotate a photo in blogger yet but you get the idea.

Above is said first English breakfast. We stopped at the Rendezvous our first morning in London on our way to Buckingham Palace. There's something I never thought I'd say.

Nice not fancy place. Diner-like, filled with business types and street workers and regulars and an American sign painter and his family.

The first surprise, the toast was cold and unbuttered. All of the toast we encountered in England was cold and unbuttered and usually served in a toast rack [to speed chilling presumably].

Second surprise, the bacon promised on the menu turns out to be ham. Not a "Canadian Bacon" ham but what we Americans call ham. They are both cured, I get it.

Third surprise, On the English Breakfasts we had the beans seemed to be Heinz Pork and Beans straight out of the can. I guess it was unrealistic to expect some slow rustic peasant beans from a peat fired hearth straight out of  a cast iron dutch oven. 

Pleasant surprise, grilled tomato.

Another oddly pleasant surprise, the sausage. A standard mild sausage with a casing but had what tasted like a corn meal filler. In the States I would see that filler as the hallmark of an adulterated sausage but it gave this sausage a corn doggie flavor which appealled to my low class tastebuds. I preferred it to the better, locally sourced, internal organ-y sausage we had with later breakfasts. 

A mild disappointment, the coffee. It arrived with a gorgeous crema

but it, and almost all of the coffee I had in England, seemed....not bad.....but...bland I guess. We did later get, what I considered, a good cup at our hotel in Bournemouth, brewed by the bed-and-breakfast-hotel manager/short-order-breakfast chef.

Anyways, after reading this it sounds sort of all Ugly American of me: everbody else's everything is inferior but that's not what I'm saying. I very much liked the "English Breakfast". When we got home I did my own homage: farmer's market egg, hot and buttered farmer's market cracked wheat bread, Eight O'Clock Columbian coffee, Wright's Hickory Smoked Bacon [not ham], Jimmy Dean's patty sausage, and Bush's Country Style Beans [with a little sage].