The GB Cafe & Restaurant on Gedling St at Sneinton Market in Nottingham is a great place to get your fill of classic old school ‘greasy spoon’ breakfast fodder.

Over the years we have frequented this place and it has been ever reliable when needing a comforting plate of food at a good price to get you through the day.

It is no frills in a very good way, the menu is full of all your cafe hopes and dreams, not just breakfast stuff either, burgers, pies, sandwiches (hot and cold) are all available. I even saw a Sunday lunch tucked away in and amongst the classics

ALL DAY BREAKFAST MENU

We were here looking for breakfast and ended up selecting a Full English for £7.95, made up of Egg, 2 Bacons, Sausage, Mushrooms, 2 Hash Browns, Tomato, Beans and 2 Black Puddings (for myself) and for my mate an English Breakfast for a pound less which was basically the same only without Black Pudding or Mushrooms.

We briefly played the ‘if you get that, I’ll swap this for that game’ as we proposed both getting the Full English, but basically that was ending up with me getting 4 Black Puddings and no Hash Browns so we begged to differ on our selections

I mentioned the Set Breakfast as a possibility in a hushed voice as that came with chips, a somewhat divisive breakfast addition amongst us. My thoughts are that you can get chips on an All Day Breakfast as that is a meal you can have for Dinner, but one served before 11am (or the Breakfast cut off time) can never have chips.

My companion is firmly down the line of never, although take the word ‘breakfast’ away and apparently it is fine to have sausage, bacon, egg and chips with beans. You can only imagine the heady levels of conversation we manage to sustain when we meet up 🙂

FULL ENGLISH BREAKFAST

My Full English was a rather large plate filled to the brim with breakfast goodness. The beans were within millimetres of escaping from the edge and our server did well to get it to the table without spillage.

Individually I might not have chosen to eat any of the different items on the plate, but put them all together and I was in a kind of greasy spoon heaven. I know it is all so bad for me, but hey it makes me feel so good when I eat it.

The sausage was your below average catering effort redeemed only by it’s crispy skin and firm filling. I have eaten worse and I have eaten better. The two slices of bacon had really been crisped up on the grill top, fat rendered, almost overly so, but it had a nice salty taste and was meaty enough to enjoy.

The egg cooked in a ring would not have been out of place tucked away inside a breakfast muffin and there was still some runny yellow yolk to ooze out as to cut in.

The black pudding didn’t have too much going for it flavour wise but I did enjoy the soft texture and the creaminess, I also appreciated the large size of the discs and that they had cooked it properly so that it was not at all dry.

For once I enjoyed these hash browns, they were a little moist and had a hint of onion mixed into the potato, usually I am swapping these with my mate but today I was keeping them.

The pile of mushrooms were both plentiful and well cooked, nothing to complain about there, the beans were also piled generously on the plate

A mug of tea and a stack of toast for mopping up bean juice and egg yolk and you were staring down at a rather decent and most enjoyable breakfast feast.

The only thing that I had an issue with was the tinned plum tomato. I left them when I last wrote about breakfast here in 2013 and they were left bereft on the plate again today

Interestingly my mate who won’t have chips on his plate happily ate his tomato, so each to their own, in a poll today 50% of participants liked them 🙂

The GB Cafe and Restaurant is located at 11 Gedling St, Nottingham, NG1 1DS. It is just over the road from Sneinton Market and just a short stroll away from the Old Market Square down the hill through Hockley.

It is always very popular and seems well frequented whenever I have visited. It is pretty big inside with plenty of seating, I would guess you could sit about 100 people if you needed to.

I only ever seem to get breakfast here but the menu does have plenty of other stuff on it, including salads so it is not just all about the possibly slightly unhealthy fare that I tend to choose from.

Whenever people bemoan that you cannot get a proper old cafe breakfast in town anymore I direct them down to the market where there are three cafes, the other two being the Avenues Cafe next door, and Mary’s Kitchen on the other side of the market. You just have to make an effort if you want it!

There is a website on line but I am not sure how up-to-date that is as the menu prices were a bit lower than the ones we saw today, still it gives you the idea so check it out here