...could save your life.
For £3.99 you can get a large fry up which consists of two sausages, two rashers of bacon, three hash browns, two fried eggs, mushrooms/black pudding, beans, half a tomato and two slices of toast. Pay an extra pound and you get a pot of tea. That’s a lot of bite for your buck. Wetherspoons aren’t alone in offering massive breakfasts but they do stand ahead of many others, and why? Quality.
The beans are Heinz. The eggs are free range. The sausages are clearly pretty good, meaty and actually tasty (not just pink-brown tubes of porcine pulp). It’d be easy for a chain of over 700 pubs, serving 400,000 breakfasts a week, to skimp on the quality, but they don’t. Sure, it’s not gourmet and it’s still piled high and dropped on the plate, but it’s a real feast for under a fiver and it’s good.
It’s also saved me on many occasions. Leaving the flat with red eyes, unsettled gut and a hazy head, it’s a three-minute walk to get to my local ‘Spoons where I can guarantee a stomach liner and a helping hand of recovery. Ordering without looking, less than 10-minutes later I’m splaying yolk and bean juice over the table as I dig in.
I’ve had breakfasts in other places nearby and nowhere compares. The sausages are terrible, the yolks aren’t runny (runny yolk is an essential part of a fry up) and the hash browns are as greasy as the people serving it. It also costs more than £3.99, which in turn is as cheap as you could make for yourself as home, but everyone knows that making your own fry up is nowhere near as good as buying one somewhere (I think this is because your house smells of ‘fried’ for hours after, plus I always feel dirty cooking it myself as if I should’ve resisted and had the cereal instead, but going out is altogether different and more acceptable).
A lot of people have bad things to say about Wetherspoons in general but I’m not one of them. In fact, I’ll say this proudly: I love Wetherspoons. And their large breakfast is a life saver for those occasions when the only thing that will do is a massive fry up.
NOTE: I've just looked on the Wetherspoons website and seen that the large fry up consists of over 1500 calories. If you are interested in counting the kcals then this represents a substantial chunk of your day's eating. Maybe next time I'll just order the regular...