Dreyfus Cafe – a bit of everything

Dishy: eggs at Dreyfus

Café culture in Clapton is on the rise, and with a slew of new cafés now open for business it seems the area’s army of freelance workers have never had it so good.

Leading the pack is Dreyfus Cafe, overlooking Clapton Square and cutting a dash with its swish cream façade.

Inside, burgundy-coloured booths add a touch of Americana, offset by European-style décor and a menu equally as well travelled.

“If anything the menu is northern European,” says owner Rokos Frangos, “but obviously if you’re serving a breakfast and brunch menu you have to serve some of the great American classics.”

Starting the day on a egg is rarely a bad idea, but even between two hungry diners, Eggs Benedict (with ham), Eggs Royale (smoked salmon) and Eggs Florentine (spinach) is usually enough.

But at Dreyfus each dish uses a single poached egg and only half an English muffin, giving you licence to indulge. The eggs were perfectly poached and the warm Hollandaise sauce, garnished with chives, was just the right consistency.

With American-style pancakes also on the menu, our inner gluttons became hard to contain. Small and pillowy, these fluffy pieces of pan-fried batter came with crispy grilled bacon and maple syrup, a marriage of opposites so right yet so wrong.

To assuage our guilty consciences, we ordered a bowl of Bircher muesli, the original Swiss muesli invented by a Zurich physician in the late nineteenth century. A combination of rolled oats, apple juice, grated apple, honey, milk and topped with Greek yoghurt and a forest-fruit coulis, the Dreyfus version of this classic morning dish almost stole the show.

A bottled fruit juice and two cups of coffee later, we left Dreyfus wired for sound and surprisingly still in pocket for the amount of food consumed. We noted the lunch menu includes Hungarian goulash, and exotic-sounding sandwiches to take away for around £4.

On the way out we spied a stack of Finnish-style cinnamon and cardamom buns. Room for a little something extra? But we contained ourselves – there’s always next time after all.

Dreyfus Café
19 Lower Clapton Road
Hackney
E5 0NS