92 Craig’s Cafe: Mod brunch

Craig’s Cafe, Bristol Street, Birmingham City Centre

The Bristol Cafe is no more. But joyfully, an even better cafe has opened on Bristol Street, and you should definitely head down there for breakfast or lunch. Craig’s is a wonderful mod-themed cafe with lovely service, tasty food, and a fun design throughout. It’s website is branded the ‘English Breakfast Club’ as well as the moniker Craig’s Cafe, and breakfast is at the centre of their excellent menu – cheap, but good quality, and lots of well-done classics.

 The seating is made up of long benches, so pull up either a bar stool or a low metal stool in mismatched bright colours to read through the menu. It feels very low key and welcoming, and although the big windows look straight out onto the Bristol Road – which isn’t that picturesque – inside feels like a lovely calm escape. Massive industrial pendant lights hand overhead, the chipboard walls are covered with vintage memorabilia and prints, and the whole effect is bright and busy and jolly.

It’s all about mugs of tea, and the mugs are massive. You really can’t tell in this picture – I should have put something in for scale – but that mug is enormous, twice the size of a normal mug. Left over tea bags get chucked in a glass jar for the purpose on each table.

The full English was delicious: Lashford sausages, Heinz beans, all proper quality ingredients. It is just a really solid full English, with everything you want, cooked very well.

Lots of food comes serviced in baking trays with deep sides – I’ve had an excellent fish finger brioche with chips on another visit and that comes in a baking tray too – which is sort of greasy spoon but a bit more polished. The sausage and egg sandwich was lovely, but what I really loved was the ‘hash brown tots’, adorable mouthfuls of hash browns in bitesize pieces. I could have eaten them all day. More places should do hash brown tots.

There is only one toilet, and it’s filled with vintage film prints and other art work. The large portrait of a lady on the left hangs right over the toilet and is certainly…unique… in toilets of Birmingham so far visited.

It’s a  great little cafe, and definitely worth a return trip.

In summary:

Price: cheap eats £7 full English, £4 sausage and egg sandwich,

Atmosphere and design: mod vintage themed, bright and busy

Food: tasty, good quality ingredients standard full English-style with some American variations (pancakes etc)

Enjoyment: cosy, welcoming, definitely worth the walk down from town if you have a little time to spare

Website: https://theenglishbreakfastclub.co.uk/ 

91 Wayland’s Yard: cool hipster brunch

Wayland’s Yard, 42 Bull Street, B4 6AF

Google pictures of ‘Bull Street Birmingham 1990s. The words that come to mind are not modern, or stylish, or cool. How times have changed. If you head to the top of Bull Street now, you will find yourself in Wayland’s Yard, which is all three.

I’ve never been to San Francisco but based entirely on media stereotypes, I feel like brunch in Wayland’s Yard is brunch San Francisco-style. It’s all vast concrete floors and whitewashed walls, block colours and a cactus wall. It’s full of people wearing fashionably shapeless clothing, probably from Cos, in neutral colours, having working lunch meetings with their MacBooks, or working alone with their wireless headphones.

The tea is ridiculously gimmicky, requiring a plastic teapot which decants from the base when you push it down to release the mechanism over your mug. For a large plastic contraption, you don’t get a full cup of tea out of it. It is clearly the worst way to get tea you could invent.

However, the food is really good.

Expectations were high, because in a rare occurrence, we were visiting on a specific recommendation (thank you my favourite shop, Glimpse). The food was even better than I’d been told.

I had the eggs Benedict, served on sourdough toast, with streaky bacon. The twist in Wayland’s Yard in pink hollandaise, which was a lot pinker than it looks in this picture, and tasted strongly of beetroot. It was delightful. The sourdough was crunchy, the bacon crackly, and the eggs almost perfectly poached: one was perfect, one was nearly perfect. 

The Wayland’s Big Brunch is a beast of a meal. It’s a mark of how routinely hipster many breakfasts have become in Birmingham that the phrase ‘avo hummus’ on the menu barely excited any comment. The replacement of black pudding with halloumi is an excellent idea. As with all slightly fancy breakfasts, the beans are upgraded with spices; these were warm and flavoursome. Sweet potato balls are a treat.

The sausages are great, dense and meaty, and a brioche bun is the most decadent and enjoyable type of bread to have.

The only real criticism on the day we visited was that it was insanely, insanely hot in there. It was a warm day outside, and inside the heating was turned up to eleven, to an almost uncomfortable degree. It felt very like being in a big old school where the central heating has been turned on ‘because it’s winter’, even though the outside temperature is still 25 degrees, and you all melt inside.

In summary:

Price: mid range – £5.50 for a sausage and egg brioche, £6.95 eggs Benedict, £11.95 full English

Atmosphere and design: urban tech concrete chic, with a black white and orange palette and acres of cool

Food: brunch all day, delicious seasoning, sauces and ingredients, but occasionally the eggs are overdone. Avocado and sourdough are the touchstones – really tasty everything

Enjoyment: quiet, despite its size. Fun place to people watch business-types at their lunches, and high likelihood of getting a table given all the space.

Website: http://www.waylandsyard.com/birmingham