Breakfast with my dad - Milk cafe

My food bible!

I have a long list of restaurants, bars, cafes and pop-ups that I want to visit in London. In fact I have a food bible where I take clippings from various magazines and newspapers and use it as a kind of foodie to-do list. Problem is, these places are on a lot of people's to-do lists, and with the increasing popularity to go with the no reservations policy, you can often struggle to get a foot in the door unless you queue for 45 minutes plus.

But that's the weekends.

So I have a couple of days off and my dad up to visit me - suddenly my options are limitless. So knowing my dad is a lover of coffee, I refer to my food bible and know just the place: Milk in Balham.

This trendy white brick cafe sits along Hildreth Street Market and I'm told is a popular place for the mummy and baby groups of Balham. Obviously they took this particular day off as it was filled with a mixture of young professionals gazing at laptop screens, tourists and the odd family (summer holidays of course).

Seated, we took a look at the clipboard menu, and began to work our way down the list to decipher what was what. It seemed that the menu essentially served all your traditional breakfast menu items, each with an added something extra, be it woodfired sourdough bread, or "hangover" sauce.

The Convict appeared to be the manly full English option, and not wanting to be outdone by my dad, we ordered two of those, a black Americano and a flat white.

Out comes our breakfast in what my dad called dog bowls (oval silver bowls that it seems obligatory for all London burgers to be served in). Placed within was a tower of breakfast items topped with an even bigger tower of grated cheese.

The Convict at first glance is a glorified sausage, bacon and egg McMuffin. But delve in and you will find layer upon layer of deliciously lavish ingredients, including a homemade hash brown and sausage patty. Stealing the show and standing out in this tower had to be the scrambled egg. A silky, creamy consistancy, delicately cooked and not at all representing any kind of dried up curdled egg that many places serve. A close second and providing a bite to the Convict, were the sweet bacon rashes. No flabby bacon in sight, just deliciously crisp and mouthwatering wonderful rashes of bacon.

All of this is wedged between two halves of a muffin, with the added richness of a tangy hangover sauce and grated cheese, bringing all the flavours together and delivering an indulgent breakfast that will leave you full for hours.

The coffee lived up to expectations, providing an equally rich taste to our breakfast banquet, and even had the seal of approval from my coffee-loving dad.

Overall two breakfasts and two coffees came to £22 and with increasing prices of coffee in London these days, this is easily a steal. Next time I go back I have to try their homemade juice served in a novelty glass milk bottle.

Yelly-fi-felly-food-belly x