It's not looking good, Bob

I must be turning over a new leaf because I’m finding it harder and harder to be mean about people even if they do a lousy job. The case in point was Greens Cafe in Oxford. I popped in here on Saturday morning because I was in a rush really. And because I haven’t been eating enough full English breakfasts lately, and I am meant to be writing a blog about them, so when I saw the sign for ‘Full Breakfast’ I thought I really ought to order it. So I did. And now I wish I hadn’t.

Green Cafe is a cute little place on St. Giles. It’s very small and seems to be best set up for take-away sandwiches but there is an upstairs where you can eat in. I had already ordered the breakfast by then otherwise I would have run off because all the tables were dirty. Finding one less dirty than the others I sat down and went to the little counter to take some condiments.

The HP sauce bottle looked like it had been sat there since HP opened their first factory. Caked in congealed HP sauce it was a sign that either the people in Oxford don’t like HP and don’t put it on their breakfasts or it’s an old bottle filled up with a cheaper brown sauce. Once my breakfast had arrived, one squeeze informed me that it was the latter. Naughty, naughty.

The breakfast itself: a sausage which was good, the toast which was from the end of the loaf and not toasted properly, the beans were good despite not being Heinz or Cross and Blackwell, the egg was OK but a bit rubbery, the tomatoes were not just under cooked they weren’t really cooked at all, the mushrooms were diabolical and nearly put me off mushrooms for life – I’m still unsure how they were cooked, the black pudding was nice and so was the bacon. I found a very strange boiled potato in the middle if it all. I think it was an attempt at a fried potato. The breakfast itself was £5.75 which is a reasonable price.

So, what am I going to give it? Well, I am going to give the breakfast two stars. One for the sausage and half a star each for the bacon and the black pudding. Mostly I’m giving them two stars because they seemed nice people and probably don’t deserve to be lopped in with the truly awful one star outfits such as Scoffers in Clapham. But to be honest, there is no way I would ever eat a cooked breakfast in there again. On the plus side the sandwiches looked nice.

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