The breakfast conundrum
And the best omelette you'll ever have
Welcome back to Fallow Chefs, lifting the lid on restaurant cooking for you at home.
This week we’ll be taking a look at ‘the most important meal of the day’: breakfast. How we’ve grappled with it at Fallow, what people want to eat, and the often overlooked but secretly superior breakfast food that is the omelette. We’ll talk classical technique and Will’s favourite flavours.
A quick flag that this week’s post contains affiliate links (AD). If we include a recommendation it will always be for something that we have genuinely used, continue to use and enjoy.
Thanks for joining us.
Jack & Will
The nuance of a restaurant’s breakfast offering could fill a book.
In the early days of Fallow’s breakfast, we thought we had it pegged. We set about creating a menu which embodied what you want after you’ve been on a stag or hen do. Steak and eggs, our signature Royales, black pudding waffles. The ultimate in indulgent breakfasts. We opened our doors to the breakfast clientele in 2023, feeling pretty happy with what was taking place. The food was delicious, after all. The dichotomy was this: while our chefs were hard at work serving up their Royales, every Tuesday morning Jack and I were having a totally different breakfast experience, just down the road. We would go to Maison François for our director’s meeting. Without fail, my order was, and still is, the omelette. A slick, clean, colourless French omelette, made with good quality eggs, with a mound of dressed herbs and pickled shallots on the side. I love it.
So as we sat there, the 3 of us eating the same quality, simple food week in and week out, we had a penny drop moment. Fallow was offering ‘lifestyle’ breakfast. Anniversaries, special occasions, a moment to treat yourself. We had people tucking into their Salmon Royale and taking snaps at 10.30am. Over at Maison Francois? The place is packed at 7.30am. It’s a totally different meal experience. They were offering functionality for people who wanted to set themselves up for their day.
In the hospitality industry, there’s a saying. At dinner, you’re cooking the food that the chefs want to cook; at lunch, you need to cook the food that the customer wants to eat. Well, if that is the case, breakfast should be even more functional. A time in the day where the offering needs to be as humble as possible. In truth? It is the moment for a restauranteur to completely remove the chef’s ego and build the menu around the realisation that when it comes to breakfast, people want subsistence, well executed. Does it mean that there’s no place for invention and luxury? Absolutely not - those things are still sought after in their own moments. But for the most part, people want an omelette. They want a bowl of granola and berries. And if, as a restauranteur, you want people to return not just for the every now and again special occasion breakfast, but for the twice a week regular, then it’s important to understand and deliver that.
So we returned to our menu. We didn’t sacrifice the things people wanted when they were here as tourists, celebrating a one off occasion, but we built it out to deliver for the every day moment. And that started with putting an omelette on the menu - something which up until then we’d delivered on request but hadn’t considered sexy enough to feature. Ours is a beautiful omelette with tiny curds in the French style. It’s topped with a beautiful green basil pesto, fresh courgette ribbons, and picked white crab meat tossed with our crispy chilli oil. It’s light, filling and very delicious. A marrying of the two worlds.
And in some ways it’s sort of bizarre that an omelette wasn’t always there to begin with, because not only am I having one every Tuesday at Maison François, but I am making one every Sunday at home. Maybe I should start thinking about some omelette based merch.
As it turns out, I am a man of habits. Saturday is pancake day. Sunday is omelette day. Most weeks I’ll be in the restaurant on a Sunday - we normally do collectively about 1500 covers so it’s a big day and an omelette has become my ideal way to set myself (and my family) up for it properly.
And while I’m not about to pick crab meat on a Sunday morning for my wife and 3 kids, I’m still looking for the marrying of those 2 worlds. True subsistence meets delicious eating, classical technique meets Sunday morning, open-the-cupboard, accessible flavour:
Perfect French omelette.
Smoky bacon crisps.
Crispy chilli oil.
This is what breakfast dreams are made of.
