Which is where breakfast comes in. (For regular readers in Xiaoxing Province and the less hospitable bits of Ukraine, it's Welsh). It's a rare chance to catch up, to make the most of time with people you care about. It becomes more than a meal- a celebration. It's a shared moment, at its best on an unhurried weekend. A sociable element is going to be to the fore here. This may well be a new concept for those of us who happily do without breakfast on a working day, or are quite unfazed by sharing charcuterie or patatas bravas or calamares or olives at lunch or dinner, but for whom any breakfast is very much a solo effort, a thing of workday necessity unpunctuated by thoughts of frankly gruesome matutinal conviviality.
Out of breakfast, comes Brecwast. An idea that the meal can be a time for sharing, and an idea that formed the basis for experimentation in the kitchen. A new menu coming out of many cook-offs between Cai and younger brother Garyn.
The cook-offs are born out of a healthy competition between the brothers, critiquing the other's effort and suggesting improvements until they're both happy. And if you're familiar with the attention to detail typical of Got Beef, you'll know that might take a while.
So Clwb Brecwast comes to us organically, hosted at the restaurant on Whitchurch Road (where else..?) at first. The surroundings are familiar- the wood, the chalkboards, the tiles, brick- but the menu is new. Brand new, because this is the opening day for a weekly popup dedicated to bringing something new to the city.
Dilemmas, dilemmas. My wife was still full from last night's meal so wasn't feeling up to a sharing plate, however tempting they sounded; with my eyes fixated on The PIG, (it's begging to be renamed 'The Notorious P.I.G., that one) I doubted even my capacity to take on that and a plate meant for two. A man should have some idea of his limits, no?
The Avo (£4) it was, then- a toasted bagel with a creamy avocado 'smash', topped with a fried egg that was all wobble and the promise of ooze.
Very good it was, too: light and fresh with a touch of lime. Any dish that manages to combine crunchy and silky in the same mouthful is heading in the right direction.
So to The PIG (£6). The lazy comparison would be the McMuffin but this elevates the idea by a few notches: this stands firmly in the American breakfast sandwich tradition. A freshly toasted muffin holds a nicely seasoned herby patty (free range pork, from Cwm Farm near Pontardawe) and then piles on some of the best things about the eponymous animal: a hint of the deep savouriness of black pudding in the purée, a fine rasher of streaky bacon. The thing couldn't really be called anything else. It's a paean to pork and it's a pleasure to see black pudding in such a setting.
When that lid goes on, with its slathering of baconnaise, you know you're in for a sumptuous mouthful: messy, but sumptuous. All that yolk has to go somewhere, after all. It's an impressive start to a Sunday, for sure.
An encouraging debut, then: the quality control and pride in finding and using substantial local ingredients is Got Beef through and through. The larger dishes- the Dirty Hash (£7) and the breakfast Tacos (£10) have that idea at their heart.
The Welsh language is pretty much a closed book to me. The concept of mutations does fascinate me, though: a word changing due to its surroundings, altering as a direct response to its context. At the risk of labouring a point, I'd say that's what Brecwast is setting out to do: to offer the city a new take on an increasingly neglected meal, to make it something you do to kick back and take your time. And for that, I'd use one one of my very few Welsh phrases and give it a 'da iawn'.
Clwb Brecwast
Got Beef
83 Whitchurch Road
Cardiff
Sundays from 0830
@brecwast
https://www.facebook.com/brecwast
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