At Radcliffe Square, a picturesque nook accessible by High Street, Brasenose students have two choices for early morning cuisine: the Vaults and Garden restaurant and cafe and the Brasenose College dining hall. As a student of a practical budget, I opted for the dining hall option, seeking both a proper English breakfast and the opportunity to observe Oxford university students in their natural habitat. Upon entering the Brasenose campus, I stumble upon a makeshift trailer painted in an unflattering shade of forest green that conjures up images of summer camp cabins. The trailer is labeled as the Brasenose dining facilities. In contrast to the grandiose Gothic and Baroque towers that have loomed overhead for centuries, this humble shanty is located inconveniently on the front lawn, a temporary eyesore that completes the picture of a renovating campus. In fact, the contrast of the makeshift and the concrete provided a contradictory image that was aesthetically unsettling. In addition, the shade of the building conflicted with the spring green of the lawn.
After walking through a hallway, the kitchen is located to the right, a poorly lit hole-in-the-wall that might have been a restroom in its past life. The morning hours doesn't usually attract heavy queue traffic. Therefore, breakfast is a self-serve meal, which presents students with the liberty to create their own serving size. The option for serving size is one that I consider essential to a successful culinary experience. With responsible adults who know the limits of their food consumption--which most Oxford students are, establishing personal serving size prevents excessive food waste. Before the hot food queue, a cereal rack provides a wide assortment of small cereal boxes and loose granola packets, located conveniently next to a pitcher of milk and a stack of bowls. Brasenose dining should consider a non-lactose option for the granola heads who can't process lactose.
The hot food queue provides all the elements of a standard English breakfast, which in itself is a novelty and often a necessity to a visiting student with a tutorial later that day. A complete English breakfast includes bacon, sausage, poached eggs, tomato, sweet baked beans, toast with an optional pain au chocolat for a little French culture. In the name of writing a thorough review, I purchased a complete English breakfast with the optional pain au chocolat and croissant and a bowl of American cereal (in the name of patriotism and homesickness). This was the exact moment during my culinary adventure when the aesthetic of the dining hall became negligible to the entirety of the experience. This pantheon of breakfast delights had cost me under £2.50. However, life in our deeply capitalist society has taught me to be skeptical of market exchanges that advertise consumer favoritism. According to my experience as an epicurean and competitive eater, price is usually directly proportional to quality.
After the first bite of my poached egg, which was lightly salted and peppered to some magic ratio of salt to pepper, I was convinced that our country should abandon capitalism for socialist food distributing queues that served Brasenose-quality breakfast foods. The egg was poached to well done with exception to a bit of yolk in the center, which provides essential moisture to a poached egg. The sausage was well spiced and provided a nice contrast of flavor to the blander egg. The sausage and egg were sandwiched between the crispy, buttery halves of a quality croissant. Despite my initial doubts about the baked beans' ability to cooperate with the standard flavors, the mild, starchy sweetness of the beans provided a counterbalance with the salt of the bacon. The cereal and pain au chocolat acted as the palate cleansers of my meal, much like the ritualistic ginger between various types of sushi rolls.
The final seal of approval came in the form of communal pitchers of coffee and tea that circulated the tables. For java junkies and caffeine addicts, the prospect of all-you-can-drink coffee is as close to an ideal of heaven as earthly possible. Afterward, as I was enjoying my third cup of coffee, I looked around the dining hall to observe breakfast hour at Brasenose outside the solitude of my own experience. Distant and separate from the makeshift kitchen, the Brasenose Dining Hall was architecturally fustian, impressive in the legacy of its walls and its lofted ceilings. All the university students were seated in one long table, an elitist cafeteria table made out of imported mahogany where juvenile university students passed around pop culture references and witless flirts.
Over the course of one meal, the previous contrast of the temporary and the old--that was once unsettling--proved to have a charming and odd quality. Reminiscent of Alice at the Mad Hatter's tea party, I was both amused and confused by the familiar mixed with the foreign, the familiar idea of breakfast at a cafeteria with the foreign setting of the architecturally relevant. Over the course of one meal, I became a convert of breakfast at Brasenose dining.
No comments:
Post a Comment