This review relates to breakfast at Sainsbury’s Arnold store, just outside Nottingham. As luck would have it, they also had a decent cook on today and we had a good, enjoyable meal. If a proper reviewer had been on the job, you would probably have had a photograph too. But I didn’t take my camera and I left my phone in the car.
I’m not really a fan of the current Sainsbury’s set up as the coffee set-up slows things down and, as a tea drinker, I don’t see why I should stand in a queue for 10 or 15 minutes as people are served, at great length, with coffee. In the good old days, when British establishments served a choice of tea or instant coffee I didn’t mind coffee drinker,s but now I have to stand round while they decide on which of the eight coffees to have I find them quite irritating.
However, today there was no queue, and we soon ordered (two Big Breakfasts and two teas) and sat down at one of the few remaining tables. It was filthy – covered in rings from cups, with a selection of crumbs and some horrible sticky patches with fluff in them.
Breakfast arrived swiftly and was excellently cooked and presented. This is not always the case.
The fried egg looked good, the sausages and bacon were both excellent (for taste and presentation). The hash brown was particularly good today, the toast was also good and so were the beans. Even the half tomato was reasonable, though a half tomato always looks a bit miserly to me.
So, that’s it. When the system is working well it is capable of producing an excellent breakfast. To be fair, it isn’t always as quick, well cooked and nicely presented as this – the last few visits here have included crusty beans and congealed eggs that seem to have been flung randomly at the plate.
In terms of a star rating – if the tables had been clean today’s breakfast would have been 5 stars. On an average day, with a queue and a breakfast that’s been flung at the plate it’s probably a 4 – good but could be better.
At £11.40 it’s not as good as the Little Chef Olympic Breakfast, but it’s almost half the price.
I’m going to try to persuade Julia to make breakfast reviews a regular feature of the blog. Wish me luck!
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Bran flakes? Shudder the thought! No wonder you like to eat breakfast out. My kids are going to be gutted about the demise of Little Chef, they’re very fond of it.
I’ve been told that they will be finished at the end of this month – some will stay as cafes rather than becoming Starbucks. Shame.
I don’t think I’ve ever gone out for breakfast and as I’ve said to you before, I can’t eat cooked breakfasts. Even if I have done a load of physical work before breakfast I still prefer a cup of tea and some muesli! A good review nevertheless. I would have expected someone to clean the table before my food was placed on it though.
Dirty tables, I’m afraid, are all part of today’s lack of service.
Yes. A very sad state of affairs.
🙁
Went out for dins last night. Seems that now the portion size is better (read smaller), it’s still filling, but…it streamlines the wallet. It’s a teeter-totter world.
That’s a lovely way to sum it up. 🙂
I’m with you all the way when it comes to tea vs.coffee. If you ever come to Maine, I expect your hair will stand straight up when you discover how coffee drinkers are catered to and how drinkers get the lowest of the low when it comes to tea. I brood about this occasionally, but, alas, it is a statewide problem that is unlikely to change soon.
I will try not to brood onit myself – I fear that like American English and American TV, we are fated to drink coffee. 🙁
Have you done the film review – Breakfast at Sainsbury’s?
I could do it in rhyme – Sainsbury’s/Tiffanies will do nicely for a start. 🙂
You are a very brave man! If I tried to persuade my wife that breakfast reviews should be part of my blog, she’d certainly reply with words to the effect of “Cook your own bloody breakfast then!” And then she’d start reviewing my parking in Sainsbury’s car park, possibly involving members of the public with those boards, 6.0, 5.7, 5.6, 5.4, 6.0, and so on.
I present it as a treat rather than a break from the bran flakes she insists on filling me with, and so far I’ve got away with it.
It sounds wholly unappealing and at 11.40 (that’s for the two of you, right?) wildly expensive…Whew. I eat at home a lot, but even with that drawback, that’s a lot of money for breakfast…more like a fancy brunch. Yipes. Glad it was good, though! But the description of the table took my appetite away!
Yes, it took the edge off my appetite too. Unfortunately that isn’t wildly expensive in the UK – a couple of “meals” at McDonalds will set you back £10 and I’m told the burgers are half the size of the US version.
One thing I notice in Europe and the UK is that restaurant meals are really expensive, but groceries, in comparison to the U.S. are very reasonable. I figured it was a bit of social engineering to get people to cook!
Possibly because we don’t tip. 🙂
Well, that’s actually part of the cost one thinks of. But I assume not in Sainsbury’s or Mickey D’s. Which may be the issue, eh?
I imagine so. 🙂
It’s been so long since I lived there (something like 1989 to 1993) that Sainsbury’s was only a supermarket I thought, and a Little Chef something cheap on the motorway, and eleven and a half quid for a cooked breakfast shows inflation has gone on and up and on and up since then–I’m glad the meal was decent though. When I lived there my rent was 35 pounds a week, and I earned 47 a week–