Breakfast at The Wolseley

I had breakfast at The Wolseley the other day. Well I had a sneak preview a few days before when I dropped by for some tea and cake and to make my reservation, but I was really more interested in the infamous breakfast.

Mind you, breakfast at The Wolseley on a weekend is no mean feat. You need to make reservations days in advance to secure a decent time slot (not good for late risers like myself), drag yourself out of bed in the wee hours of the morning on a Saturday (again not good if you’ve had a late Friday night out) and make sure you get yourself there on time to fight off any last-minute, no-reservation stragglers waiting like vultures for your table to be released. Talk about working up an appetite. Well okay, maybe I might have exaggerated the vulture bit but there is some truth behind it. The Wolseley, while admitting reservations, operates a policy of seating a proportion of seats on a first-come-first-served basis which means that it is possible, if your stars are aligned, to get a table for breakfast on a weekend without a reservation. Having said that, I noted a number of would-be patrons were turned away at the door that day.

So why The Wolseley? That was precisely what I wanted to know. So much has been said about this place that I wanted to see what the big deal was. The Wolseley was originally commissioned to be a car showroom for Wolseley Motors in the 1920s, before becoming a Barclays Bank branch. That too closed to become The Wolseley that we know today. Inside, the interior is opulent, magnificent even. The expansive dining hall leaves you momentarily rooted, but as you settle in you start to notice the tiny details. Black and gold is the colour palette here, from the artwork on the panelling to the marble floor tiles, and the black iron chandeliers with their yellow-gold cups of light. At the coffee bar, black urns of tea with gold Chinese script adorn the shelf, and above that, a Japanese lacquer painting in gold of mountains, streams and trees. And if you look high enough, tiny black painted leaves like fern slowly fan out from the tops of the pillars towards the beige-white ceiling.

The buzz of breakfast was already in full-swing when we arrived. It actually gets quite noisy here on weekends. Clinking of cups and clattering of silverware compete with the chattering of well-heeled patrons. They say that The Wolseley is the place to celebrity-spot, not that I noticed anyone familiar. A breakfast menu was swiftly handed out by a smiling waiter. He made me feel at ease; in fact there was nothing stuffy about the service. The wait staff encourage the indulgence of eating your breakfast in whatever way you like, without raising an eyebrow. I ordered a hot chocolate.

The menu is not unlike any café-on-the-corner that does breakfast, but at twice the price. It mainly consists of standard fare: full English breakfast, porridge and muesli, bacon rolls, eggs in a variety of manner. In addition it serves an array of bread (the viennoiserie). There isn’t a lot that could go wrong with that, and nothing overwhelmingly exciting at first glance. Why do people come here then? Is it because it is posh, a place to see and be seen? Do we come here so that we can tick the box and say yes, we ate at The Wolseley, and regale the tale to our friends? Are we trying to keep up with the Joneses or are we just curious, to see what makes The Wolseley tick? If we praised the food would we be doing it because it is The Wolseley?


The food arrived and we tucked in. My eggs tasted, well, like eggs. And you can’t tinker around much either with the taste of mushrooms at breakfast. As I mentioned, there is not a lot that could go wrong with breakfast staples. But here’s the distinction: a lot of effort goes into making your food look out-of-the-ordinary and taste perfect. I think we underestimate how difficult it is to get something simple as eggs to cook right. Even mushrooms need to be grilled just right so that you don’t cook the hell out of it. But that’s the beauty of it, these guys make something simple look actually simple and effortless. They know that you are paying good money for regular fare and make darn sure they pull out all the stops to get it right, right down to the presentation. The guy who did my salmon and eggs, you could tell that he took the patience to slice the salmon to equal widths and overlapped them lengthwise to form a ring around the scrambled eggs. The sausages were evenly browned. My croissant was beautifully puffed up, it looked like it was about to breathe…. Even my hot chocolate was sufficiently thick, yet not too hot as to burn my tongue. These are details that we take for granted, because we assume it is ordinary fare. But these guys pride themselves on perfecting these details where others fail. Why should breakfast be spared the extravagance and attention to detail compared to dinner? Is it not considered to be the most important meal of the day?

The guys at Wolseley have got it right I think. Talk about product differentiation. And if you read A.A. Gill’s book “Breakfast at The Wolseley”, you will come to appreciate the mechanism that runs behind the kitchen doors and on the floors. They take pains to recognise regulars and note your favourite beverage / food / newspaper / allergies. That is service. And maybe this is another reason why some people keep coming back: the familiarity and expectation of a good breakfast is sometimes better than in our own homes.

The Wolseley
160 Piccadilly
London W1J 9EB
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7499 6996