My Old Dutch - Chelsea

So my world cup challenge starts with the beaten finalists last time round, The Netherlands. Dutch food culture in the UK seems fairly rare, certainly nothing like the likes of Italian, French or Spanish. If you suggested going to a Dutch café to someone in Britain I suspect many would think you were proposing something other than somewhere to go for breakfast! Whether this because Dutch cuisine isn’t that different from our own, or because there is a relatively small amount of Dutch people living here, I’m not sure, but it meant there wasn’t a massive amount of choice for somewhere to go for breakfast.

My Old Dutch is a chain of 3 restaurants in London specialising in the Dutch forte: Pancakes. I visited the Chelsea branch located on the Kings road, alongside high end fashion boutiques and incredibly expensive home furnishing shops. This place certainly plays up to stereotypes of Dutch culture, which the walls painted orange, tulips on the tables and pictures of windmills hanging from the walls. Having never been to an Amsterdam café, I can only assume this is what they must be like?!

And on their breakfast menu (served from 11am – 1pm each day) alongside pancakes topped which jam or chocolate spread was the full breakfast pancake. This featured scrambled egg, bacon, fried mushroom and tomato at a cost of £8.95. When it arrived I was taken aback by the size of the plate. The picture doesn’t really do it justice; it must have been 14” in diameter. The combination worked better than I had expected, the mushroom paired with the pancake worked particularly well. The eggs and bacon were good too but the whole thing was a bit dry (baked beans would have been a nice addition). It was incredibly filling to the point that I was struggling to finish it at the end, but I suppose that is what you get when combining already eggs and bacon with a giant pancake!

The verdict
I doubt this is a traditional breakfast in the Netherlands, but it is the closest thing to a Dutch fry up we have here in London. It didn’t quite work for me, but I would recommend if you are looking for something a bit different.

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