Restaurant website available here

If you read about my favourite cheeses you might remember that I have a bit of a thing for halloumi. I hadn’t had halloumi for a while (I had it once in the nearly five years I was in the US for) and the last time I did I cooked it and didn’t do it quite right.

So when I went into the good old trusty go to of a Wetherspoons recently I ummed and ahhed about what to have from the breakfast menu for a while; I still want to have a returned to the UK proper fry up but then I was also looking at the Miners Breakfast because black pudding… but nope the fiesta brunch won me over instead.

Halloumi, poached egg, toast, avocado, mushroom and pico de gallo with a side of salsa. Sounds good right? Well this was mostly good. The pico de gallo left a little to be desired in terms of the super chunkiness of the onion and the quantity of very pungent onion vs fairly watery flavourless tomato (though I suppose this is personal preference).

We also might need to talk about the poached egg itself for a moment. It was runny and well cooked, I can’t fault that, but what cooking method did they use to make it look like that? There is no way that was just dropped into a pan of boiling water directly from the egg shell. It was way too rounded in shape and with the yolk far too centred in there for that to be the case. Part of me understands there being some device or special method to it because of production costs, time and consistency but also a poached egg isn’t actually that hard and honestly if the chef can’t pull it off repeatedly then… I feel for them a bit for choosing that as their career.

Overall, especially for the price (thank you Wetherspoons for not whacking up your prices too much in my absence), this is a pretty solid addition to the menu. It mentions having a little bit of a kick and I think I had one bite that made me go “oh yeah spice” but otherwise I wouldn’t really say it was spicy at all. Now if they could just do a terribly British chain pub take on menemen or a full kahvalti (Turkish Breakfast) that would be perfect.