This is not just any french toast. This is a slice of french toast with paparazzi. Search photo-sharing sites such as Instagram and Tumblr and hundreds of identical images flood across the screen: a blue-and-white china plate, a triangle of toast, a triumphant swirl of pale green Mr Whippy teetering at its side, the whole thing shrouded in a sort of gloomy patina of shade.
Even the most jaded critics have barely been able to contain their praise: in the London Evening Standard, Grace Dent called it “the greatest new pudding in London for 2015”, with its “buttery, syrupy, sticky middle, crispy edged, hot from the pan sweet stodge”. And this is from Olive Magazine: “Never has a slice of french toast been so large, or satisfyingly squidgy.” It has clearly come a long way from those slices of stale bread dipped in egg and fried, the eggy bread of a 1970s childhood, sprinkled with a bit of sugar and maybe a splodge of jam.
It took America, of course, to turn french toast into an extravaganza, stuffed with cream cheese or peanut butter or banana, soaked in bourbon custard and piled ludicrously high with towers of berries and whipped cream.
For a simpler inspiration, I turn to Joanna Brennan, from the award winning Pump Street bakery in Orford, Suffolk, whose french toast is an homage to her Canadian roots. It’s been a staple on their brunch menu since the start: the only improvement, she says, was a recent switch to brioche. “The bread needs to be a little dry, a day old, so it soaks up the mix – we use single cream and eggs, a bit of vanilla seed – that’s it. Ideally it should be rich, but very light. It’s decadent, but keeps an airy quality: we don’t want it to be too wet. And it’s fried, of course, to get that crispy exterior with a pillowy inside.” She soaks the brioche slices in the custard mix for just a few minutes: “It’s very delicate, you have to be quite careful” – and serves it up with maple syrup, bananas and bacon.”
If she took it off the menu, she says, customers would be bereft. “It’s part of that whole comfort food thing: it’s familiar, it’s warming, it’s an echo of childhood.” There are occasional twists: seasonal specials such as hazelnut butter and honey cream – but as a brunch staple, the classic recipe seems to work. It’s when french toast transforms itself into a dessert that anything can happen: an evolving trend you might call “a la recherche du pain perdu”.
In London’s Duck and Waffle, chef Dan Doherty creates a Spanish-style Torrejas, served in a cast-iron dish with maple caramel apple and cinnamon ice cream: it has been a fixed item from day one. Salon in Brixton tried drenching home made hot cross buns in booze-spiked custard overnight for an Easter special, topped with blood-orange marmalade and creme fraiche. And for sheer extravagance, the roving popup The Toastess deploys its fried slice as a mere carrier for a big wodge of sticky toffee pudding, or apple crumble, complete with lakes of sauce.
But the winner of this modern-day toastathon has to be the Bone Daddies Shackfuyu version. Or – to give it its full name – the “kinako french toast with Matcha soft serve”: a dish that attracts comments positively overflowing with hyperbole: “This is the best thing EVER!” “Too delicious!” “Obligatory – and oh so good!” Shackfuyu’s general manager Alina Sann admits it isn’t the most refined dessert, but it’s something even the most ardent foodie probably won’t have seen before: no mean feat in itself. “It’s actually a hard thing to get right. We had to experiment a lot, and during the first couple of weeks it wasn’t as good as it is now, it was a bit dry, not quite crunchy enough. Now it’s soaked overnight to give it the right consistency, the right amount of butter – if there is such a thing – and everything is in balance.”
And so it is: the plate of toast, with its gently melting swirl of ice cream, its dust of kinako crumb, its pillowy, buttery centre with a hit of maple syrup and its caramelised crust. It was kind of plain, in a classic sort of way: not too sweet, the rich egginess cut by the slight astringency of the matcha. It was certainly good, but more importantly, it was ready for its close up. A humble dessert, that quite unexpectedly became a legend in its own lunchtime.
