Stuart’s Guide to Hatfield #2: Erol’s Café and Grill

Erol’s is what Lonely Planet-writing Australians would, with no thought for the lives of their readers, call a ‘Greasy Spoon’.

This is of course a slanderous misnomer. Not even the regulars in Erol’s would think to use a spoon for eating anything greasy. Spoons are for eating the froth off the top of the cappuccinos.

Don’t let your cappuccino-related prejudices mislead you. Erol’s fried breakfasts come with ever-so-slightly congealed baked beans, fried eggs with semi-transparent albumens, sausages with a consistency that means they are not so much cooked as toasted, bacon with a rust-coloured frying scorch to it, and mushrooms fried in the same fat since 1978. Regular patrons – builders, roadworkers, car criminals, old age pensioners and most of my office - wouldn’t have it any other way. But the coffee is something else. It doesn’t matter which of the surprisingly large variety of coffees from the menu you order, when your mocha, cortado, americano or regular coffee arrives, it will look, taste and wear the signature two inch chocolate dusted froth of a cappuccino.

It is simply the way things are.

Any attempt to ask for your coffee to be changed will be diligently ignored by the the mysterious and rather short-tempered blonde woman with the eastern european accent who waits tables in there.

Do not alter your order. Do not change your mind. Speak up.

This advice, unlike the food, is for your own health.
Other than this, the atmosphere whilst ‘eating in’ at Erol’s is wonderful.

Erol’s also does a takeaway service, dispatching cheaper and bigger bacon rolls than the satanic and debauched Simond's Bakery across the square. Considering that The Cheese Shop does cheaper sandwiches, Erol’s Café does better breakfast rolls, and the assistants in the Bakery are all extremely rude, it is surprising that Simond's does as brisk a trade as it does. There is only one feasible reason that I can see. The manager and staff of Simond's Bakery are in the pay of the Devil, selling sesame-seasoned satanically sanctioned baked goods to the unaware and vulnerable citizens of Hatfield. They obviously plan to use the takings from their extortionately high prices to fuel corporate expansion of the chain, ultimately spreading to every town on earth towing a dark evil in their wake.
You know - like McDonald’s.

I digress.

Once you have achieved the not insignificant goal of getting your order into the kitchen via the waitress, everything in Erol’s is cooked to order, meaning that patrons have time to appreciate the artwork on the walls, or contemplate the marketplace outside the glass front of the café. There is a painting hung on the wall above each table, around twenty in all. There are four different pictures. Directly opposite Erol’s on the other side of the marketplace is a shutdown food store, boarded up and covered with bill posters for a party a few summers ago. A layer of grey-walled flats sits on top. Between there and the customers of the enigmatic Monsieur Erol is the cobbled surface of the marketplace, broken up in a few places by grassy areas and a few anaemic spruces. Saturday sees the Farmer’s Market take up residency there, where the good people of Hatfield can decide not to buy dried grasses and ostrich burgers. Why would they want to? They can go to the gingham table-topped pillar of the community that is Erol’s Café and Grill.

Recommended: Ask for the Full English breakfast - very politely.

Next up on Stuart’s Guide To Hatfield: The Galleria Shopping Centre