Brick Lane’s Most Controversial Breakfast Destination Is Back and the Queue Is Already Around the Corner
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
I Went to the Cereal Killer Cafe Reopening and I Have Questions About All of Us
The Cereal Killer Cafe has reopened in Brick Lane and I queued for twenty-seven minutes to get in, which means I am part of the problem and also part of the story, and I have made peace with both of those things. This is what London does to you. You mock the thing, you go to the thing, you write about the thing, you are the thing.
For those who need the context: the Cereal Killer Cafe opened in Shoreditch in 2014 and immediately became the most talked-about piece of evidence for everything that was wrong with gentrification, artisanal food culture, and the general trajectory of East London. It charged £3.20 for a bowl of cereal. This was presented as either audacious entrepreneurialism or a sign of civilisational collapse depending on your zip code. It was pelted with eggs by anti-gentrification protesters in 2015. It has now reopened and the queue is around the corner and I was in it.
What I Actually Think
The cereal was fine. The cafe is genuinely fun in the way that very committed, very specific nostalgic experiences are fun — it is floor-to-ceiling cereal boxes and neon lighting and a menu that includes Lucky Charms served with strawberry milk, and if you decide to enjoy that rather than analyse it you will have a perfectly pleasant twenty minutes eating sugar for breakfast in a room that feels like the inside of someone’s very enthusiastic childhood memory.
The London Prat has covered the reopening with its characteristic mixture of affection and mild horror. Bohiney’s take on capitalism solving its own problems is relevant here: the Cereal Killer Cafe is capitalism solving the problem of what to do with cereal by making it artisanal and putting neon on it. The protesters who pelted it with eggs in 2015 were angry about gentrification. The queue today contains many people who live in the gentrified neighbourhood they were angry about. East London contains multitudes. So does a bowl of Lucky Charms with strawberry milk.
I had the Coco Pops. They were good. I took a photograph. I posted it. I am not entirely sure what this says about me but I am confident it says something. Probably something about London, and how we process our relationship with the city by participating in it and then writing about having participated in it. This is, I think, the human condition, expressed through artisanal cereal. The cafe is open Tuesday to Sunday. The queue will be there. Join us.
