After the brief terror of nearly losing one of my favourite local restaurants, I've decided to show some love for some of the excellent food and drink currently coming out of my adopted home town - a big change from the days when I'd get the train to meet my friends as a teenager, and we'd spend our afternoons eating cheeseburgers and smoking cigarettes at McDonalds (inside, using little foil ashtrays, those were the days) followed by sharing an illicit bottle of vodka down on the Rye.
I've written favourably about Bluegrass before, the pudding are particularly good, but a little (long) while ago they also started doing breakfast. With pancakes, smoked meat, bottomless filter coffee and tea (served in huge enamel tea pots) and just ten minutes walk from our front door, it's needless to say the Ewing and I were soon regular visitors.
For a whole egg-avoider, pancakes are a perfect breakfast foodstuff, and the ones they serve at Bluegrass are my favourite fluffy american type. That said, the ones served here are a little flatter than normal, being more like a the scotch pancakes that we used to bung in the toaster and spread with butter and jam when I was growing up.
That said, anything covered with crispy bacon - they serve proper streaky stuff here - banana, pecans and maple syrup is always going to be pretty good. They are also commendably generous with the toppings and serve shots of maple syrup for extra lubrication.
Bacon and banana is my favourite of the combos I've tried, but the fresh blueberry and blueberry jam, served here with some phallic bacon and plenty of syrup, is also good. More unusual, and worth a try, is the apple and sausage stack - with bramley apple sauce, cinnamon sugar and pecans - which is also good value at six quid.
For a mere fiver you can get your pancakes with chocolate chips, caramel sauce and ice cream. It's a majestic-looking plate of food that's just a little too much refined sugar at such an early hour; although, judging from the amount of people ordering it when I've visited, plenty disagree.
Even better than the pancakes are the Bluegrass breakfast plates. The smokehouse plate- texas toast, baked eggs, bacon, sausages, pit beans, smoked mushrooms, grilled tomato and homemade hash brown - is my favourite, while the Ultimate Plate also adds a pile of pulled pork and a short stack of pancakes.
As their flat top grill is in use cooking the pancakes and texas toast, the eggs come oven-baked in little enamel dishes. Apparently, they're pretty good with soldiers of the aforementioned toast for dipping; I've never tried them, preferring to swap my l'oeuf for an extra, oniony hash brown, which are some of the best I've eaten.
So, while the only smoking going on is the meat - which is all still slow smoked over hardwood on site - and the illicit vodka has been replaced by a menu of bourbons and whisky (which you can mix with Welch's grape juice, for a real American breakfast vibe), I can certainly think of worse ways to while away a morning in Wycombe.
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