Coffea, Brewer Street

Brewer Street is one of the most interesting and diverse streets in Soho, and indeed in London.

Along its length you will find excellent Japanese noodle restaurants, sushi bars, a Japanese grocery store, a couple of Italian restaurants (one owned by 'celebrity chef' Aldo Zilli), a fantastic French seafood bistro called Randall and Aubin, a falafel bar, an Italian deli, pubs, bookshops, a health spa, two DIY stores, a gay lifestyle emporium, adult sex shops and a porn cinema.

And a travel agent and three hairdressers. And a little shop that sells old-fashioned, English sweets from giant jars.

And it's not even a long street!

It also contains a number of small cafes one of which is very good (Cafe Rio) and another which is... well...

My Coffea experience started well enough, with friendly, courteous staff and no need to wait as the place was empty. I ordered a sausage sandwich with brown sauce. The waitress suggested a baguette and as I like to go with staff suggestions in places like this, a baguette it was.


Perhaps I've been spoiled with all the great places I've discovered recently (see the Top 5) but this was a truly atrocious sausage sandwich. The sausage was pasty and mushy, with little semblance of meat inside its casing, which looked like it had a fake tan.

The bread was definitely stale - but how many days old I couldn't quite tell. The attempt to toast the baguette had only succeeded in making it flaky and crumbly.

The brown sauce was generic cafe brown. Normally not a crime but in this context, it added to the misery quite considerably.

A bad excuse for a sausage sandwich and a rare instance of me buying a sausage sandwich but not finishing it.

0 out of 5. Avoid, and walk a few extra steps to Cafe Rio.