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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.