Breakfast bites – The Sanderson

50 Berners street, W1T 3NG

It was a beautifully cool morning, giving some relief amid the recent heatwave when I found myself walking to the West End’s Sanderson hotel. It’s the  1950’s building oozing with that ‘Festival of Britain’ charm and optimism in the middle of Fitzrovia media land and I was off to meet an old boss for breakfast.

Actually reading that last sentence back it sounds a little sinister in a Hannibal Lecter kind of way but I was really just going for breakfast with someone I used to work for!

The exterior might hark back to post-war optimism but the interior has a more recent epoch in mind. In the late 90’s early noughties this place was so achingly hip it had captured the zeitgeist and put it in a bottle on the bar.

The reception is a room of flowing white curtains, slightly hidden doorways and furniture that looks as if it’s part way mutating into a monster. You expect to see the likes of Moby in earnest conversation with a couple of All Saints, whilst dot.com whizkids hawk their wares to unimpressed bankers. The ambience of the Sanderson is less is more. Room rates reflect this with pricing determined by the number of right angles to be found inside.

The restaurant is situated at the other end of the long bar from reception. It is pleasant enough if a bit over designed like the rest of the hotels public spaces. The breakfast menu is expensive, but at the level you’d expect from the sorts of hotels that the Sanderson sees as it’s per group.

Like many breakfast menus the Sanderson’s has become rather egg-centric (see what I did there,) putting our oval shaped protein pals at the centre of the breakfast experience. You can have the scrambled, on toast, in an omelette or with various accompaniments. There is also a selection of breakfast classics (French toast, pancakes, full English etc.) to choose from and a cold buffet.

To go with the full range of food, there is of course an exhaustive drinks list featuring all your favourite and things made by putting kale into a blender. I started with a flat white, whilst the boss twos upped with an English breakfast tea and grapefruit juice.

The coffee was good with the strong gourmet taste you’d expect at these prices, whilst the boss announced himself more than satisfied with the grapefruit juice. For our food, I ordered a cheese and onion omelette with a side of streaky bacon, whilst the boss went to check out the full scope of the £18 buffet.

This is where the problems started. The omelette when it came was not the cheesy taste explosion I’d been hoping for, but a soft floppy item, bland as a Richard Clayderman LP and much more expensive. The streaky bacon was both streaky and sometimes crispy and then sometimes not. It was both over and undercooked at the same time, quite an achievement.

For the boss, things weren’t as bad, but he was let down by the croissant which was less silver service and more service station (his words). The buffet provided quite a wide choice of cold breakfast items, fruit cold meats, cheeses etc. The produce however, didn’t seem up to the price tag. One exception was the smoked salmon which was subtle and not overly smoked or salted.

At this point the service which had always been charming now added chaotic to it’s list of virtues with white Americano’s coming without milk, us being asked on a number of occasions what rooms we were in and then finally the bill arriving unasked for.

The bill came to £34.5 including service which I thought wasn’t too bad, what I didn’t realise is that none of the drinks had been charged for. With the juice at £7 a time, and coffees £4 a cup our bill should have probably been double what it was. I don’t usually say this, but even for the location and the ambience, this simply isn’t worth it. These days there are many good choices for a business breakfast in London, and on this occasion thee Sanderson didn’t seem to have what it takes.

Till the next time Rob