£90 for breakfast? We review London’s first Michelin-starred breakfast tasting menu
The Four Seasons’ Pavyllon has unveiled London’s first Michelin-starred tasting breakfast, a £90pp five course morning extravaganza. Will it impress breakfast superfan Anna Moloney?
London’s hospitality sector may be struggling but there is one category that is big business: breakfast. Long famed as the most important meal of the day, that has not necessarily made it the most exciting one, but London’s fine dining scene is trying to change that.
The rise of luxury breakfast
According to Kantar, breakfast was the fastest-growing dining occasion last year, with a 13.7 per cent year-on-year increase, and luxury restaurants are responding. From Hide’s lobster Benedict (£70) to the Ritz’s three egg, royal beluga caviar omelette (£750!), Londoners and tourists have proven willing to stump up to set their days up right.
Cue Pavyllon at the Four Seasons Park Lane, which this week launched London’s first Michelin-starred breakfast tasting menu – an “experience” consisting of five courses, served with paired juices for £90 a head. The menu has been created by Pavyllon’s executive chef Benjamin Ferra Y Castell under the supervision of chef Yannick Alléno, the world’s most decorated Michelin-starred chef (joint with Alain Ducasse). I went to find out if it could beat my usual peanut butter on toast.
First thing’s first, if you’re someone who doesn’t get hungry in the morning, this obviously isn’t for you. Service starts at 6:30am on Saturdays, with latest bookings at 10:30am. In other words, this is not brunch, it is unapologetically breakfast. And for that, I applaud it. For too long, we’ve been smushing meals together and calling it progress.
At £90 a head (or £70 without the juices), it’s expensive but not prohibitively so – and, dare I say, it’s actually good value compared to its competitors. Likely a combination of fewer people drinking alcohol and a kind of lipstick effect of people choosing to splash out on breakfast rather than a considerably more expensive dinner, punters have proven willing to pay, with Pavyllon reporting a 43 per cent uptick in breakfast bookings last summer compared to October 2024. Consulting an expert in this field – my own millennial brother, of the avocado-eating, big brunching, no housebuying generation – he confirmed he would be very interested in this kind of experience.
A course by course breakdown
On to the food: upon arrival, things are kicked off with the ‘seasonal viennoiserie’ course (translation: pastries), prepared by the restaurant’s executive pastry chef Francesco Mannino. For this, your server will bounce over to you with a full board of flaky deliciousness, from which you can pick from croissants, pain au chocolats or the seasonal special. For us, that was some sort of hazelnutty, cakey creation with gianduja sauce – definitely not NHS advised but absolutely divine. For those pacing themselves, you can also opt for a mini baguette. Accompanying this was a cold moka infused with szechuan pepper, topped with whipped cream and nutmeg. This all constituted just one course: buckle up.
From there it’s onto another seasonally changing ‘bakery creation’, currently a lobster ‘croast’ – croissant-toast, for the uninitiated – which tastes as good as it sounds, and for me was the standout. Think buttery, pressed croissant base, filled with lobster meat, topped with rocket and generous shavings of parmesan. To wash that down is an amuse juice (I get it!), served in a shot glass, which I insist you swill. This isn’t just breakfast, it’s theatre, and you’re part of the performance.
So are the chefs, who prepare your courses in an open kitchen before your eyes, with all tasting breakfasts taking place at the counter. Thankfully, the chairs are squishy and backed, as it did take my guest and I over three hours to complete the experience (it definitely doesn’t need to take this long, and in fact I overheard the waiter commenting that such breakfast languishers were encroaching on the lunch service).
Moving to the mains, guests can pick from either the classic eggs menu (Benedict, Florentine or Royale, served with caviar if wanted for an extra £5) or the weekly chef special. This can include dishes from Turkish eggs to a pan-fried morning pizza, but for launch day it was an “English-breakfast inspired raviolo”. The words “sausage extraction sauce” made me a little queasy, but if you can get past that you’ll be treated with creamy, savoury, saucy goodness, unlike anything you’ve had for breakfast before. Raise a toast to that with the accompanying Kir-royale inspired, alcohol-free cocktail, which manages to make a beetroot juice feel positively decadent. Somewhere along the way, you’ll also spoon down some granola or chia pudding as a palette cleanser (read: filler).
At this point you’ll be over two hours deep and already approaching your daily allowance of calories – but you must troop on. For the final push it’s an indulgent French toast, golden, syrupy and with whipped cream and caramelised hazelnuts dolloped on top. This is paired with a ‘Morning White Forest’, a sharp and appley digestif with needed cut-through for the sugary dish, and also coming with its own kind of breakfasty petit four in the form of two glazed cherries dipped in desiccated coconut.
Your waiter will then remind you that your meal does come with a tea or coffee, which you can enjoy in a post-breakfast stupor. They even pack you off with a box of chocolates to take home, should you somehow still be hungry after all of that. I emerged onto Piccadilly around two o’clock, wondering what just happened. It’s unashamedly silly and I’d go back in a heartbeat.