Breakfast at The Bailey Café

 15 July 2022

 

The Bailey Café 

91 Bree Street, Cape Town

 

The Bailey Café is probably the pre-eminent luxurious and welcoming  café space on Bree Street right now and, going by the numbers of patrons and gawkers coming through the doors, it’s definitely the joint du jour.

 

There’s a brasserie and a whiskey bar upstairs, and I haven’t seen those rooms but would guess they’d be pretty nifty too.

 

I felt at home and  my spirits lifted as soon as I stepped inside and I wasn’t even feeling down to start with.

 

The front, street level section, has a high ceiling, the barista  counter, with a display of pastries, is to the right; there are two small, high tables at the windows on either side of the front door; and deep blue, upholstered banquette seating on the left, with small, round, marble topped tables, in front of a wall decorated with a profusion of mirrors in gilded frames. If you traipse upstairs, there is a mix of large and small tables, a long bar counter and a lounge corner with leather couches and low tables. 

 

It's smart, sophisticated and elegant.

 

There is an issue with the banquette though, in that the seats are too deep for comfort. If you want to sit back, you can’t eat comfortably at the table; if you eat, you must sit forward and upright. Lots of plump pillows against the back rest would resolve this practical issue.

 

Breakfast is served from 07h00 to 11h00 and, oddly, something like a croque monsieur, which I see as a breakfast dish, is available only from 12h00.

 

The breakfast options are divided into cold and hot. On the cold side there is a selection of pastries, the standard muesli, fruit and yoghurt health options and smoothies. If a warm breakfast will hit the spot, you can have oats, French toast, cold smoked salmon (how is this hot?), the Irish or English breakfast, eggs Benedict or Florentine, a frittata and an omelette Arnold Bennett.

 

As is now de rigeur, you can add one or more of 8 possible items.

 

On first impression, the breakfast menu isn’t particularly adventurous and plays it safe with simple crowd pleasers. Fair enough, if the dishes are exemplary, but I do like to see something more intriguing than a fry up or eggs Benedict, to make breakfast a little adventure. 

 

Today, I went for the English breakfast because the Irish breakfast with steak, black pudding and rösti was too much food and too much price (at R180,00)  and I didn’t want to eat yet another eggs Benedict breakfast.

 

I don’t usually order any version of a “full English” breakfast anymore, partly because it tends to be indifferent and partly because 99% of allegedly “full”  English breakfasts are pitiful approximations of the real thing. 

 

To their credit, the Bailey Café just calls it the English breakfast and makes no claim for comprehensiveness of form.

 

It’s a decent plateful and mostly well-cooked but unspectacular. The single fried egg was overcooked but the mushrooms and generous quantity of bacon were perfect as was the spicy Cumberland sausage. The beans were home cooked and almost worth the price of entry on their own.

 

I finished with a scrumptious apple turnover (R35), presented in a huge shallow bowl, which seemed a bit too much crockery for the pastry, and an Americano (R32).  The crust on the turnover was light, flaky and crisp and the apple was juicy and not too sweet. I would say that it sets the bar for apple turnovers in Cape Town. 

 

The bill came to R202,00 before tip.

 

I really like the interior of the Old Bailey Café, the service was a joy to behold, my breakfast  and the coffee were good and the pastry was enchanting.

 

Quite a few passers-by, some tourists, some local, came in for a quick squizz at the place, promising to return tout suite, a phenomenon I found quite curious, as if the Bailey were some tourist attraction rather than simply a new kid on the culinary block. The patrons were equally interesting,  mostly well-heeled ladies who brunch (and the odd male companion), which accentuates the utter trendy fashionability of the Bailey. Kudos to Liam Tomlin; he’s created an exquisite space and livened up a street that’s become a tad stale.