E. Pellicci Café: A Full English Breakfast in London
On Britain's register of listed buildings you'd expect churches, Victorian railway stations and country houses of the gentry. In January 2005 the register took in a café from London's East End where the bacon starts spitting in the pans at a quarter past six in the morning.
E. Pellicci Café in London's Bethnal Green has been run by one Tuscan family since 1900, and its full English breakfast, the hearty fry-up of British cuisine, ranks among the most celebrated in the city.
From Tuscany to Bethnal Green Road
Priamo Pellicci moved to London from Tuscany, took a job in a small café on Bethnal Green Road and later bought it from the owner. He died in 1931, though, and the place was left to his widow. So the initial E. in the name doesn't belong to the founder but to Elide Pellicci - the woman who held the café together and whose portrait still hangs inside. Today the fourth generation of the family stands behind the counter with its Italian roots, and Maria Pellicci has been cooking here since the sixties. The founder's son Nevio was born right above the café; for this family, home and business were never two different addresses.
Capocci the Carpenter and the Kray Twins
The place owes its listed status not to an architect but to a regular. In 1946 the carpenter Achille Capocci, a loyal customer, paneled the single room from end to end in art deco marquetry. Not quite sixty years later, inspectors from Historic England singled out that work as an increasingly rare example of the stylish Italian café that flourished in London between the wars. So the man who got the café onto the register of listed buildings was a carpenter who came here to eat. The history of the East End also survives in a guest book nobody keeps: Ronnie and Reggie Kray, the most feared gangsters in the neighborhood, had breakfast here almost every morning - at six a.m., on their way home from the nightclubs where their working day had just ended.
What Lands on Your Plate at Pellicci's
E. Pellicci is a classic caff - what Londoners call the small cheap eateries they also know by the fonder nickname greasy spoon. It's in places like these that the full English breakfast gets fried most often: eggs, bacon, sausage, baked beans in tomato sauce, a grilled tomato, mushrooms, toast and black pudding, a blood sausage. The Pelliccis add an Italian streak to the English base - lasagne holds its place on the menu right alongside the fry-ups. The big fried breakfast isn't an English specialty alone; the whole of the British Isles shares it. I cover what sets its Irish sister apart in the article on the full Irish breakfast. Or at least I gave it a shot.
It's open Monday to Saturday, from 6:15 a.m. to 5 p.m. On weekends the line outside the turquoise storefront can easily run an hour; come on a weekday, or right after opening, and you sit straight down. It's cash only, and there's an ATM directly across the street - the place has solved the card-terminal problem in the neatest way possible: it left that to the bank.
Breakfast on the Second Try
I first turned up at Pellicci's on a Saturday around eleven in the morning. It was pouring, and the line outside still looked like an hour's wait; I gave up. The second time I came right after opening and sat down without waiting. What arrived on the plate was a Cumberland sausage, a fried egg, two rashers of bacon, two hash browns, two slices of black pudding, baked beans, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms and a thick slice of toast running with melted butter - for 15.50 GBP (16.80 EUR). The sausage was coarsely ground and peppery, the yolk spilled at the first cut, and the black pudding was earthier and more heavily spiced than its reputation promises. I've been to London many times and it was my favorite big city for years - and I've never eaten a better full English breakfast there. I left the empty plate thinking that next time I'd stand in that line even in a downpour.
E. Pellicci
