Eat, Arndale Centre, Manchester

Saturday mornings are normally a scramble for food for me, I normally do my weekly shop on a Saturday afternoon/Sunday the previous week, so by the following Friday evening the cupboards are pretty bare. Plus I am generally feeling the effects of the post work, Friday night drinking binge, which just adds to the fact I need food, but with minimal effort required. This past Saturday was slightly different, yes the kitchen was as barren of food but I found myself with a clear head, strolling round the Arndale Centre around 9am with hunger pains. Ambling past “Eat” and noticing one of their menu items was “Full English Breakfast”, I smiled and proclaimed “RESULT”.

What a mistake, I quickly shuffled to the counter, smiled and asked “Can I have the Full English please?”, to which the response was, “Sorry we have ran out of the English breakfast”. HOW THE HELL CAN YOU RUN OUT OF A FULL ENGLISH BY 9AM, IF AT ALL. I panicked, caught between walking out of the store and asking how can you not have a full English, my instincts took over and I scanned the menu, Eggs Benedict?? Can’t be that bad?? Fill a hole for a while?? Mistake number two.

I ordered a Mocha to sit fiddling with until the food was ready, which was very nice to be fair, but you can’t really screw up a coffee with these coffee machines nowadays. Sitting patiently waiting for the food to arrive, I was snapped out of my day dream by one of the girls behind the counter screeching “IIIGGGGSSS BIINIIDIIICHHH”, was that my order?

What the girl passed me over the counter was nothing short of woeful, it wasn’t a plate, it wasn’t a tray, it was a piece of tin foil about the size of a jar lid, with the logo and tag line “The Real Food Company” plastered all over the foil. I gently and slowly took this disgraceful meal off the girl and looked at her with confusion flickering in my eyes. I unwrapped the foil, which to my surprise wasn’t tightly wrapped making the meal inside even smaller, this was turning into a complete joke, it didn’t even have any sauce on it. It was one of the smallest muffins I have seen with a poached egg and shrunken slice of bacon on it.

“OK OK”, I told myself, could be quality not quantity, wanting so much for this meal to give me some satisfaction, mistake number three. Basically what “Eat” had done was to cook all the full English food, put it on muffins, then toasted the muffin once someone ordered a meal. It was terrible, eggs were tasteless, the bacon hard and dry, they hadn’t even buttered the muffin and the sauce normally drenched over Eggs Benedict was just a pipe dream.

I will certainly never be consuming anything again from so called “Eat, The Real Food Company”, what a terrible first meal to start the day with, a disgraceful, soul sapping experience.