At the turn of this year I creamed my pants about The Backyard Café. It was, I said, the best place for breakfast / brunch / lunch in Birmingham, despite not actually being in Birmingham. I stand by that statement. It is worth the detour, the Saturday morning hop on the bus to Kingswinford, or the lazy Sunday morning drive. It is worth arriving famished so that you can eat multiple plates, and cancelling the afternoon and evening meals to enjoy the cakes you’ll inevitably take away. The Backyard Café do it better than everyone else.
I insist we go this time to eat The McYard; their take on the ubiquitous breakfast bap from everyone’s favourite child fattening multi-national. It is familiar in structure and flavour profile, but that is where the comparison ends; this is a McMuffin on steroids, the Backyard’s Hulk to their David Banner. The sausage patty is robustly seasoned and light in texture, with a glazed rarebit (utter filth), fried egg (total filth) and crispy onions (not filthy enough), sandwiched between a halved muffin because that’s how Hamburglar demands it. It’s too much and yet never enough as I mourn it’s demise whilst wondering how I’ll waddle to the car to get home. They even get the Full English right; good quality bangers, bacon with crisp fat, creamy scrambled eggs, a kind of leftover veg hash, beans, black pudding, roast tomatoes and mushroom, toast. It’s £7.75. I’m sure someone, somewhere, thinks that is expensive but lets be real; I’ve paid three times that for a lot worse. I don’t come here enough so we also get the confit duck leg with mac and cheese. At first I thought the citrus glaze on the bird clashed with the cheesey pasta though it grew on me like the mole I should really see the doctor about. By the time we finished it I wanted more.
I know what you’re thinking. What you’re thinking is “get me off this rollercoaster of food excitement. I can’t take anymore”, but no, hold on, because we’ve got one last run left. We take home two cakes; a textbook custart tart with a light dusting of nutmeg, and a toffee, rum, and chocolate donut. I will repeat. A toffee, rum, and chocolate donut. I eat it whilst watching Landscape Artist of The Year, the boozy filling dribbling down my chin and onto my t-shirt. It is here, from the sanctuary of my sofa, I decide that we need to live much closer to The Backyard Cafe.
I probably should have got an A2B here
