no. 122: the biggest river in london

This isn’t really my beat, but Isaac Rangaswami’s, or Jonathan Nunn’s, you should go read what they have to say after finishing this. A tip of the hat also to Russell Davies and his love of eggs, bacon, chips, and beans during an earlier era of the internet, and Adrian Maddox and his love of formica .

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I haven’t seen the kitchen at Terry’s and I don’t really want to, because I want it to look just as it does in my mind’s eye: small, unorganized, its walls lacquered to a Chippendale shine with decades of grease. I want there to be a blackened griddle the size of a billiard table, crusted and dripping, beneath a hood they only clean for coronations. I imagine the cooks in tank tops, and aprons that look like yesterday’s mug, listening to the cricket while turning out hundreds of monuments like this:

The egg came from somewhere good, cooked so the yolk luminesced like the setting sun. I could write you a paean about the encased meats, but there are too many of those on the internet already, on less deserving subjects. My photo didn’t quite capture the leaf of parsley, Terry’s must go through an entire bunch on a busy day. We pecked like finches, carnivorous, regretful finches, frightened away from the Cumberland sausage by a looming lunch.

Maggie brought us to Terry’s, because it’s “either a London institution or a caricature of one” and maybe the two have merged like Janus, facing the old world and the new. There are clotted cream walls tiled with picture frames, none of the photos in color. Gingham everything, veteran chairs, quarry tile floors, and Staffordshire china revered on high shelves. On the counter splits of champagne lounge in a bucket of ice.

London’s caffs are apparently as endangered as old school hawkers in Singapore. I don’t know if Terry’s ever really was “just a caff,” or what that phrase might even mean. I imagine a place that feeds people, with basic amenities and simple food, intent on affordability. Adrian Maddox thought it was about the architecture (mid-century panache, lots of formica), their third space factor, “somewhere for calculated repose and day dreaming: private yet social; discrete yet visible.” Either way, a haven. The need for succor is implied, a working day, a thin wallet.¹

Terry was a butcher in Smithfield who opened the place in 1982, meats encased to his specification. Was there ever another version of this breakfast, with a properly ripe tomato and sausages made one pig at a time? I think the fry up has always been industrial food, baps from production lines and beans from tins.

Maybe Terry’s always had champagne. I’m guessing the Passion Storm smoothie is new. In 2012 a cup of tea was 20p. It’s £2.50 today, and our fry up was £18. The locals still come. You can get steak and scallops at breakfast, coffee from Monmouth and sourdough from St. John — the toast in the photo isn’t. I don’t know where they used to get their bread. Maybe more has appeared than disappeared.

London’s biggest river is its river of tourists, a tributary of which eddies into Terry’s. It seems like some of them are trying to travel in time as well as space. Maybe this is what happens to endangered species.

1. People ask me why Little Perfections is called Little Perfections. There are many reasons for the title, but that feeling of sitting down to a plate of something good, that you feel you can afford, is definitely one.