One wonderful thing about the restaurant community in Shreveport-Bossier is the randomness with which we are gifted with incredible international eats. You can get what may be the best Hawaiian food in the South from Ono’s Traditional Hawaiian Cuisine, outstanding Peruvian food from El Mono, or pick up the national sandwich of Boznia and Herzegovina while you’re grabbing a king cake at Julie Anne’s Bakery and Cafe.
Add to that list crumpets, full English breakfast platters and “bubble and squeak” from Glenwood Tea Room. If you or someone you know has a taste for English-style breakfast – which, admittedly, isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (sorry!) – the Glenwood Tea Room’s new English breakfast offerings make for a fun and unusual breakfast date.
“It’s a British tea room, after all,” says Glenwood Manager Charlotte Vickery. “I’ve gotten some raised eyebrows, but if we’re going to have scones, we needed to have crumpets and bubble and squeak.”
A full English breakfast platter ($10.95) comes with eggs any style, bacon, grilled tomato, pan-fried mushrooms, hearty toast and lots of baked beans. It may look alien to American diners, but a plate full of eggs, beans, bacon and tomato is actually really pretty great. I didn’t try the bubble and squeak ($9.75), but I did try the crumpets breakfast ($11.75), which was terrific.
As far as breakfast breads go, crumpets rank right up there with biscuits. They’re a sort of cross between English muffins and pancakes. At a loss for how to describe these griddle cakes to a friend, the best I could do was: “they’re like English muffins that actually want you to eat them.” The surface of Glenwood Tea Room’s crumpets is crisp and covered with tiny little pockets – great for grabbing hold of their homemade jams and preserves, butter or egg yolk.
If English breakfast isn’t your thing, Glenwood also serves some of the best traditional American breakfast platters in town. I’ve not come across bacon of higher quality or more perfect buttermilk pancakes anywhere in Shreveport-Bossier. While the setting may not read “diner,” the American breakfasts here certainly do. If you’re looking for a new breakfast option and haven’t given this place a try, it’s worth your time to do so – even if you have no intention of eating baked beans for breakfast.
Glenwood Tea Room opens at 6 a.m., Tuesday through Saturday.
