I didn’t see any blue and white police tape at the Tesco Extra café in Brislington. The forensics team hadn’t arrived either, which was odd as there had certainly been a crime committed - a crime against the art of cooking a decent breakfast that is.
At just after 9am on a wet weekday, the large, spotlessly clean in-store café wasn’t exactly busy. Apart from us, there were just a few Tesco workers having a snack before clocking on or off their shifts, and an elderly couple enjoying a pot of tea and slice of cake.
The café serves food from 8am through to the late afternoon. From 11.30am, the lunch menu includes crispy chicken strips and fries (£6.95), fish finger wrap (£4.50) and ham and cheese toasties for £4.25.
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There’s a kids main meal deal for £3.25 and cheese and beans jacket potatoes at £4.55. Apart from an ambitious £9.95 for the vegan ‘Beyond Burger’, prices are generally kind.
At the counter where you order, there are also cakes and pastries. To get into the Easter spirit, you could order the £3.95 ‘Hot Cross Yum’ - a toasted Tesco Finest ‘extra fruity’ hot cross bun with vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce and marshmallows.
But it was the breakfast and brunch menu we were there for. From the healthy option of granola and yoghurt bowl (£3.15) to the posh shakshuka-style eggs (£6.40), there’s plenty of choice to start your day.
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To cover both bases, we ordered The Breakfast (£4.90) and The Brunch (£6.25), with two standard pots of tea (£1.70 each) and grabbed one of the tables looking down on the vast supermarket. We had a perfect view of aisle 18 - ‘canned foods and soup’ - and people scanning the shelves of yellow-label clearance reductions.
This was admittedly the first time I’ve had a Tesco café cooked breakfast. In fact, I can’t remember having a supermarket cooked breakfast before so my mind was open.
As unhealthy and unfashionable as they are, I still love a full English breakfast cooked by somebody else. Bristol is fortunate to still have a few greasy spoon cafés serving up decent fry-ups - from Totterdown Canteen on Wells Road to Top Nosh on Soundwell Road, the city has some crackers.
At £4.90, the cooked breakfast at Tesco Extra café in Brislington is, on paper at least, a fair price. Eating it, however, comes at an even higher price.
To say this was the worst cooked breakfast I’ve encountered this year is an understatement. It’s arguably the worst cooked breakfast I’ve ever had.
The two hash browns were the best things on the plate. As freezer-to-fryer triangles of shredded potato go, they were pretty decent - golden, crisp and slightly spicy.
The baked beans and single rasher of bacon were lukewarm, the half-tomato hard and flavourless. The fried egg was passable in that it had a just-runny yolk and the underside of the white was lacy and vaguely crisp.
Two triangles of toast were dry and burnt on the bottom. If you can’t toast bread, there really is no hope.
But it was the grim sausage that stands out in this memorably bad breakfast. More cold than lukewarm, with bits of blistered skin hanging off, this abominable banger had the appearance of an embarrassing and painful sunburn incident on a nudist beach.
The Brunch ordered by my daughter wasn’t much better. Again, the hash brown was good but everything else was below-par.
There was tiny pot of lukewarm beans and two lozenges of cold halloumi with scorch marks to give the illusion that they had been cooked on the grill. The white of poached egg was snotty, the mushrooms leathery and the rocket limp.
If my substandard sausage had a contender for the worst thing on our table, it was the avocado served with the brunch. Brown and mushy, it wasn’t just ripe, it was like something retrieved from the brown food waste caddy at home.
The only upside of our abysmal brekkie was the staff serving behind the counter. Friendly and chatty, they were easily the highlight of our visit.
Tesco Extra cafés should be a showcase of the products served in the store it serves but that’s sadly not the case here. If anything, the food we experienced made a strong case for going elsewhere - the first stop being the aisle selling the Gaviscon and then maybe a bucket from the household section.
