Breakfast nomination #12, Spoon in Newington
Nominated by oldest friend and dear wife, Ashley
With guest reviewer, Sarah Courtney
Originally reviewed April 17th, 2016
"I might get a tipple! Whatever that is. Oh, it's alcohol."
His score: 3/6 (revised from a 4/6 initially) My score: nope, just nope
Sarah's score: ⋆⋆⋆/⋆⋆⋆⋆⋆
He ate: grilled kippers with wholemeal bread (£9) with a Whole Earth cola (£2.60)
I ate: the veggie grill (cooked breakfast) (£8) with a hot chocolate (£3.20)
Sarah ate: mixed grill (cooked breakfast) (£9) with a freshly squeezed orange juice (£3)
Total cost: £34.80 altogether, or £22.80 for me and Gary and £12 for Sarah Our pros: loads of space and light inside; water delivered to tables at start of breakfast, and varied breakfast choices in terms of healthier options e.g. porridge, fruit etc.
Our Cons: disgusting beans with breakfast; overpriced; website info out of date; slow service; cold and empty feeling inside café; smelly toilets and the food just wasn't that great.
Our experience: I have to start off this review by saying our next nomination *was* the King's Wark on the Shore but as they don't even serve breakfast, we had to strike it off the list completely! A shame as I was looking forward to it but no breakfast = no review. If Sarah, Gary and I were making up our own Breakfast Club this morning, it was safe to say we we the hungover Breakfast Club after a perilous night of drinking last night.
We began our expedition to the café with Sarah blindly (in one eye, at least) toddling over to me and Gary on Princes Street and declaring "I actually feel ok, I think. I mean, I can't see out my right eye and I think I'm still drunk but other than that..." so we were off to a great start.
When we first went into Spoon and were seated, I was genuinely quite positively bowled over with how it looked - loads of big leather sofas everywhere with lots of space, loads of seats and big windows letting light fill the room but then after we sat down I started noticing how cold the whole place felt and how echo-y it was.
The menus we were given were also different to the ones online which had said they were up to date as of 7/3/16. The menu in Spoon had more options which was good, however it was more expensive than the prices on the website which was quite frustrating - some of the stuff as much as £1 more than what it allegedly was a month ago.
After tallying up the total costs for breakfasts just now (I may not have fully taken in menu prices when initially sat in Spoon due to hungoverness), I really feel like we were overcharged for everything we got and especially due to the food quality. Sarah and I agreed that the chips we got with our breakfasts were really tasty and a nice, unique touch to the meal however there was only a small portion.
The beans that arrived with the cooked breakfasts looked bizarre and when I tentatively tasted mine (Sarah outright avoided hers due to not being a big fan of tomato sauce) I wasn't sure wtf I had just eaten.
The best way I can describe it is like having eaten cold tinned tomatoes with beans mixed in with it - it was repulsive and I left the rest of them on my plate. Sarah said her sausages were great, the haggis was...well, just haggis really but she was not bowled over by her egg as it seemed a bit slimy and strange.
Mine also was not particularly nice and I felt like I'd just paid nearly £10 for a plate of disgusting beans and cooked tomatoes and the other ingredients were almost an afterthought.
I did enjoy my toast but the rest of the meal left something to be desired. I had the combined feeling of feeling as though I had only eaten half a breakfast whilst also feeling as though the breakfast was purely stodge that was sat uncomfortably in my stomach for the rest of the day. So, I left feeling both empty and uncomfortably full at the same time - some of this could be attributed to the hangover but the breakfast was not good. All Gary could say about his breakfast, aside from "why did I order kippers!?" was that it felt like he had literally just eaten kippers for breakfast. Kippers, just kippers and more kippers. There was two piddly slices of bread on the plate too but not enough to drown out the extreme... kipperiness of the breakfast. After we left he said he felt like he just drank a mouthful of seawater as it was all he could taste for the next few hours.
The place opened at 12pm today and we were sat inside by about five or ten past. There were already a few other tables filled with people by the time we got there but there was still more empty tables than full ones yet I felt the service was really slow.
It took quite a while for anyone to take our orders and then maybe ten minutes for them to even bring our drinks over.
By the time breakfast was delivered, we were starving but unfortunately it wasn't worth the wait. All I could think was how would they cope if all the seats were filled? If the place was maybe, at most, 1/4 full and the service was that slow then I dread to think what they would be like if all the tables were taken.
We wouldn't go back or recommend and the best thing about today just had to be the ridiculous chat we had with half-blind Sarah but everything else felt a little meh.
What’s next: the Water of Leith café in Stockbridge, the third café to be nominated by our AM, Ally. The other two being Urban Angel on Hanover Street and Cross & Corner in Canonmills.
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