Mourning Meal

Winston Churchill liked to start the day with a bit of grouse and a dollop of caviar. These days at 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Wilson often greets the morning with a plateful of steamed turbot. For passengers on the daily Brighton Belle train to London, it is buttered kippers or poached eggs on haddock. At certain inns across the countryside, morning brings York ham, Lancashire black pudding, deviled kidneys and broiled mushrooms. Indeed, Somerset Maugham's classic gustatory advice to overseas visitors still holds: one can eat well in Britain if one eats three breakfasts a day.

How much longer appears to be the question--and the prognosis is dim. The British equivalent of France's Guide Michelin is an annual directory of hotels, inns, restaurants and pubs published for the past 13 years by Travel Critic Egon Ronay, a Hungarian-born ex-hotelier. In the 1970 edition of his Guide, Ronay calls hotel breakfasts, "with notable exceptions, one of the heavier crosses we bear on our inspections." More specifically, the guide's 16 food tasters and bed testers reported "disgusting coffee, cold toast, tinned juices, brought into one's room with the delicacy of a hangman." The press concurred. "I'm sorry, but we knew that already," wrote Daily Mail Columnist Vincent Mulchrone. "Breakfast, like beer, is one of those subjects the British go on about until they are at their chauvinistic worst. The fact is that the great British breakfast has been a very phony British institution for a long time. While panels of French and Italian doctors are urging their people to switch to the British breakfast, the British are giving it up."

Platinum Mounting. Well, not entirely. Small country inns, says Ronay, can still be counted on for the old-fashioned superb breakfasts served by "the godsend of a middle-aged woman, almost a nurse, who takes such care you almost want to marry her." In a very few top-drawer London hotels, "reverence is still paid to bacon and eggs --if not to the customer. They set out a piece of toast as if they're mounting it in platinum."

In general, however, what Food Columnist Adrian Bailey called the meal that built an empire appears to have declined along with Britain's dominion over palm and pine. Where to go, then, for a memorable breakfast? To the U.S., suggests Ronay, who seems to have been impressed not so much by the quality of American food as by the efficiency of room service. "Such rapidity!" he exclaims. "You hang that thing on the door and breakfast does arrive on time." Just where in the U.S. that remarkable experience occurred Ronay, unfortunately, does not specify.

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