picture from The Guardian 

Last time I was in London I read a small article in Time Out about two brothers who were soon to be opening a café that only sells breakfast cereal. On the one hand this is the sort of thing that I would have thought of years ago and dismissed as one of those fantastical ideas that would never work in a million years, on the other hand it’s exactly the sort of idea that the world of the hipster would embrace. Despite a failed attempt to raise funds via Kickstarter the café is now up and running. They sell breakfast cereals from all over the world which can be ordered with a choice of milks.

As a fan of breakfasts (although favouring the fry up over the bowl of cereal) this sounds like a brilliant idea. After all, nobody thought it was daft when Kellogg’s started selling packets of Corn Flakes and other lines in a small plastic container with a spoon and a bit of milk in newsagents and convenience store so that people who are too busy to stop for a bowl of cereal at home can have one at work instead. I can’t believe that this wasn’t thought of sooner.

Already they have incurred the wrath of the lower reaches of the gutter press because of their high prices in a poor part of London. This raises a question that nobody has asked (to my knowledge); would it be acceptable to charge those prices in a more affluent area? This café is situated in Shoreditch which although is in the Tower Hamlets area, is the very epicentre of hipster life. Something I discovered while finding myself in a pretentious pub in Nottingham’s Hockley area was that money is no object to these people; they spend all of their money in overpriced establishments yet can’t afford to buy the right size hat it would seem, unless they want to look like clowns. How they get this money is a mystery because you never see the silly hat and rolled up trousers brigade doing a proper job, so presumably you can make a comfortable living running a shop selling knitted yoghurt and cupcakes.

Besides, is this café really that overpriced? Three pounds for a bowl of cereal might sound like a lot of money but have you ever bought a cup of tea from a train station? A box of teabags is about two pounds and a pint of milk about sixty pence, but a cup of tea in a nice café will cost you that for one cup. A pint of Guinness in a pub averages between three and four pounds but you can buy it cheap and drink it at home, and a ‘chippie tea’ for the two of us nudges towards the twenty quid mark yet I’m sure that if I grew my own potatoes, went out to sea to catch my own fish, soaked my own mushy peas and had the foresight to pickle my own eggs then I could recreate the meal for less. Eating out is a treat that we pay a little more for, given that people have done some work towards getting the food from the kitchen to your table.

The price of a bowl of cereal is simply a stick that the critics are using to beat the proprietors with and the sight of a busy café in operation while a Channel 4 reporter tried to belittle them speaks volumes about the popularity. Whether or not this will last is another matter, what is more likely is that a spate of copycat establishments will crop up before imploding and six months later nobody will remember such a thing existing and nobody will believe you when you mention it. If you don’t believe me then I will give you two words; oxygen bar.

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