[London] Breakfast at Granger & Co, King's Cross

It’s been more than a quarter of a century since I first had Bill Granger’s scrambled eggs, plus the ever-popular, much-copied ricotta hotcakes with honeycomb butter and banana, but I seem to keep wanting to go back for more. That was during Melbourne-born Bill Granger’s Sydney days. In 2009 he de-camped and moved lock, stock & barrel to London. But Granger & Co still serves out his signature dishes - as good as I remembered them to be, and to a larger, even more enthusiastic crowd these days.

We were at Granger & Co’s King’s Cross outlet recently. Like its sister-outlets elsewhere (e.g. the original at Notting Hill), you get a bright dining room and al fresco seating on a sun-bathed terrace outside. The King’s Cross outlet which opened in 2015 was the third in London after the Notting Hill and Clerkenwell ones.

Seating at the bar counter is less cluttered here than at the smaller, busier Notting Hill outlet.

With a no reservations policy, be prepared to queue, as always with Granger & Co everywhere.

Bill Granger has introduced a number of new, inventive dishes which I hear is good. I’d never been able to pull myself away from his 3 signature breakfast dishes (scrambled eggs, ricotta hotcakes & corn fritters with bacon) to find that out for myself. One day, one day.

Brekkie today:

  1. Scrambled eggs with sourdough toast
    No one does scrambled eggs quite like Bill Granger does. It not only tasted good, it even looked like a piece of artwork:

  1. Ricotta hotcakes, banana and honeycomb butter
    Much copied throughout the world, but it’s never the same as the real thing here.

  2. Sweet corn fritters, roasted tomato, spinach and bacon

Suffice to say, Granger & Co never disappoints me. I just need to come back for lunch one day, and explore the rest of its menu.

Address
Granger & Co King’s Cross
7 Pancras Square, Kings Cross, London N1C 4AG, UK
Tel: +44 20 3058 2567
Opening hours: Mon-Sat 7am-11pm, Sun 8am-10.30pm.

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Wonderful photos, especially the Ricotta Hotcake pic.

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Thanks! Even better to taste those hotcakes. :grin:

Those scrambled eggs are so unusual!

Yeah! My wild guess, they poured it slowly in the pan to create that ribbon feel.

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The recipe is here

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We also need a very heavy saucepan to make good scrambled eggs the way Bill does. I’m still marvelling at the swirl their chefs managed to achieve with their rendition.

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Shocked and saddened by the news of Bill Granger’s passing on Christmas Day. One of my absolute food heroes, gone too soon. RIP, Bill.

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So young! I remember him from tv. Never went to this place in London though.

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I’d been a regular at his first Sydney cafe, Bills, in Surry Hills, since the 2000s - I didn’t realise till now that he was so much younger than I am.

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I went to a bill’s in Waikiki in May 2019, which closed in 2020 or 2021. I didn’t know anything about Granger, but I liked my brunch and the experience.

I remember seeing the Granger & Co near King’s Cross, when I stayed in the neighborhood for one night, around 2016. We had eaten breakfast at the restaurant inside the hotel attached to the station, and I remember thinking that I should have tried Granger & Co.

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It was in the early-90s when New York Times’ legendary food columnist, R. W. Apple, tried Bill Granger’s scrambled eggs and declared it “the best in the world”! In fact, he was so intrigued by the dish that he smuggled a sample of the scrambled eggs back to New York to be tested in a lab, just to see what it contained! Of course, it was just eggs, butter and cream - the magic was in its cooking: the pan used, the technique, the timing.

For me, going to Bills at Darlinghurst when visiting Sydney was akin to making a “breakfast pilgrimage” of sorts in the 1990s/2000s. That huge flower- and fruit-laden communal table sang “Sydney” all over.

I remembered going to Alan Yau’s very first Wagamama in 1993, I took a look at its long communal table and thought, Hey, London’s adopting the Sydney way of seating now. :joy:

It was a huge surprise for many of us when Bill Granger decided to move from Sydney to London, with his entire family in tow. He gave his reasons in his subsequent TV cooking series.

For us, he was an Aussie food icon, like Neil Perry or Maggie Beer or Stephanie Alexander. It’s akin to having Nigella Lawson suddenly announce that she’s emigrating to Australia. :joy:

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I didn’t know about Australian folded eggs until 5 or 6 years ago!

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