Montford Bridge Cafe, Just Off The A5!
It’s a funny old thing when you think about it. Our apparently proud nation, a nation that once ‘ruled the world’, spending 100s of years travelling the World, opportunities to explore endless cultures, explore new worlds and bring it all back home to allow our home soil to embrace these new learnings. Yet, here we are never quite sure what our food culture and identity is or ever was.
The constant and persistent debate on what our national dish is lacks any solid or universally agreeable answers and it just seems to confuse the rest of the world into thinking our food’s awful. The Tikka Masala seems to rear its head as soon as this debate starts and what a way to celebrate the wonderfully welcoming and multicultural food world we have developed in the last few decades! One dish that needs to always be in the fray has got to be the cooked breakfast. The good old fry up, the ‘Full English’! An ever changing landscape with seriously diverse iterations, largely focussed on preserved pork and tomato products on the side of some eggs and bread.
At its essence there isn’t much more British than that. Our struggle for food identity stretches deep into personal experiences. It’s a simple fact that we're not eating real food anymore and without going too far down a rabbit hole, we are cultivating generations that don’t even know whether their food is real or not. The cooked breakfast does nothing towards helping this situation. Packed with questionable elements whose own quality is really the determinative factor is deciding it’s ‘realness’. It’s a subjective topic, one close to people’s hearts. A real sausage to some may be a pastey, tasteless, over processed meat tube that’s barely clinging onto its pork identity; served in a ‘caff’ with hot drinks that have 2 options and packed with ‘real’ people. The kind of places where breakfast is served all day, entirely separate from the lunch menu, so the meal doesn't need to hide behind any other labels. Of course, you have the exact same number of people on the other side of the fence waving their herb flecked, loose textured and heavily pork flavoured sausage, quaffing hot drinks covered in foamy milk swans, ferns and hearts; cheering to their outdoor bred real food. To some, that’s an over complication and set only for over priced cafes and people eating ‘brunch’ in their middle class comforts.
This is what I love about the cooked breakfast. It has something for everyone. It’s something that everyone has a close affiliation to and something everyone has an opinion on. It’s something everyone knows and it’s rich in nostalgia, which will always draw out the most emotion! It’s what you know that counts when it comes to a cooked breakfast and I’m all here for it! A rare dish that evokes strong opinions in a food culture that is slowly slipping into oblivion and disappearing into a ‘I don’t really care’ black hole. Opinions are great. We need more of them when it comes to food. It shows we care, it shows we are thinking and this is where my love for a cooked breakfast knows no bounds! Whether you want fresh tomatoes or tinned. Hash browns, fried potatoes or even chips. Whether you want your beans to be in a separate bowl, smothered all over everything or whether you have strong feelings towards what the beans can or cannot touch. That’s before we even go anywhere near the egg debates!
It’s a rare dish that carries versatility as its secret weapon, whilst also being a cooks nightmare and a smooth service’s Achillies heel…..the dreaded breakfast amends that can sink service within 2 orders…..no mushrooms but extra sausage, no hash browns but extra beans, 1 white toast, 1 brown toast, one poached egg and one fried egg………multiply that by 20 covers and then add an almost undoubtedly hungover chef and it’s a recipe for disaster!
Whatever your own opinions on the realness or what makes up a good cooked breakfast the one common ground almost everyone agrees on is generosity. This is where my own preferences lean towards caffs over cafes. The closer to the centre of town you seem to get the higher the price and the smaller the breakfast and often the less provenance in the ingredients. With a dish rooted in working class history, value and generosity surely have to be key in determining how good a cooked breakfast is.
Looking objectively at cooked breakfasts through these glasses can really knock you for 6 when you're looking at options in Shrewsbury. In fact, it will knock you right out of town. Don’t get me wrong, there is a time that this middle class cook needs his fancy (some might say overcomplicated) breakfast, listening to a Radio 6 playlist in trendy surroundings, served with such an ornately decorated coffee that you almost don’t want to drink it, but being honest, this isn’t the middle class cook talking from his heart.
His heart is in a caff, in comfortable, unassuming, clean surroundings that lack too much pretention. He doesn’t even want a coffee, he wants a tea, and it’s in a mug. His breakfast is packed with good quality produce, cooked well and presented respectfully without any unnecessary bells and whistles. His breakfast is packed with the classic elements a breakfast needs, no surprises, no attempts to be ‘different’. And it’s all for under a tenner.
This breakfast he dreams of exists, it’s at Montford Bridge Cafe just off the A5. What I could only really describe as a cooked breakfast oasis. Somewhere between a truckstop and a caff but not quite at a cafe, it’s just about the perfect setting. It’s an unassuming but comfortable place; light, airy and plenty of sunlight shining through the almost entirely glass frontage, it even has an outdoor terrace that I cannot wait to enjoy when the warmer months finally arrive. From the moment I walked in I felt like I would be back. It had that familiarity to it, despite having never even set eyes on the place before. There’s an approachable and welcoming feel. The menus on a blackboard. I always feel safe when the menu’s on a black board. There are plenty of choices for breakfast and lunch and there’s no confusion about the way you order or how things work, something that's becoming far too regular of an appearance in more trendy cafes. Go to the till, order, sit down…..exactly how you want it to be. Authenticity oozes in this place.
I’m there for one reason, the cooked breakfast so it doesn’t really cross my mind about looking much further beyond. I tackle the gluten intolerant elephant in the room (that’s me). It’s not a problem, the sausages and black pudding are glutinated which will forever be a slight disappointment to me. You don’t know how much you love sausages until they are taken away from you but 2 extra rashers of bacon and some gluten free bread is a more than satisfactory swap. They are also really clear about the cross contamination issue in their kitchen. The staff are just on the money!
They have some coffee from a local roaster but with a proper cooked breakfast, I need a proper cup of tea! The tea is served in a mug, bag in, ready for me to do as I wish. Milk, sugar, condiments and cutlery and everything else I might need are all on an island in the middle of the caff. The authenticity of this place is so apparent that despite it being my first visit, I seem to already know where everything is.
Before even getting to my table, right back by the glass front to absorb all that winter sun, I chatted to some of the staff and some other customers; everyone seemed cheery. This seems like a happy place for people! Big smiles and good food are almost always hand in hand! I love an air of optimism before eating!
The food is clean, tidy and obviously cooked with care. There is no grease in sight. It’s presented exactly how it should be. All elements are placed neatly on the plate. It hasn’t been rushed and every element takes up its own space, nothing too stacked, nothing too layered but also everything looks like it belongs. It’s a relief from the all too familiar attempts to build architectural structures with breakfast items!
The back bacon is thick cut and is cooked beautifully - a far greater skill than people give credit for! That even golden fat lining the entirety of each slice of back bacon. People get the idea of ‘crispy bacon’ so very wrong. They cook it to death on a mission to make it as ‘crispy’ as possible. This is closer to perfectly rendered gammon steaks than bacon from a caff. The hash browns are perfectly crisp and golden without a drop of excess grease. The eggs are glistering, the yolks almost urging you to pop them, another heart wrenching sausage forget-me-not. The beans are in a small pot. I’m a smother on the plate kinda guy but I get it. People want that to be their own choice! If I’m honest the tomato and mushroom needed more cooking. Particularly the mushroom, it needed a good 5-10 minutes more but small issues like that are so unbelievably forgivable when this beautiful breakfast was only £9.50 including the tea!
Quality wise all the produce is way beyond its means. The bacon is high quality, not overly salty and very real tasting. The owner came over to check if everything was all good and I found out they use Appleyard’s (local Shrewsbury Deli) for their bacon and sausage and the eggs are from local free range hens. There’s a consideration to this place that is set entirely around value and generosity! Way beyond their prices and way beyond my expectations.
I feel like I’ve found a new regular spot. Nicely off the beaten track and a caff with more value and generosity than I could ever have hoped for. The staff told me there are plenty of walks into the surrounding woods and the menu offers something for everyone. It’s left me with excitement, not only for the great food but because this is a place I can bring the kids that we will all enjoy without any compromise!
