Joanna Blythman: Singl-end Café and Bakehouse, Glasgow

I understand the appeal of breakfast-come-brunch to hard-up millennials: you have a restaurant experience, loaded with on-trend ingredients, without having to fork out too much. They’re only too happy to leave the £40 upwards per head meal to their parents. They don’t care if the lavatories are rough, the service languid, as long as they can spin out a latte for hours while fiddling around with phones and laptops. High-end brunch- Australians have it down to a fine art- is quite a feast, lavish with nut butters, berries, ricotta, maple syrup, and other quietly expensive ingredients that can generate a bill of surprisingly large proportions. Lesser brunch outfits present a business opportunity for would-be entrepreneurs who aren’t flush with cash. You don’t need a great kitchen, or a highly trained chef, as long as you can handle a fry-up and buy in bread and cakes- the 21st century equivalent of the greasy spoon.

Glasgow’s Singl-end was well ahead of the game, almost visionary, when it opened up its first café in Glasgow in 2015. It instantly distinguished itself from those lazy brunch places by doing all its own baking and learning a few tricks from Ottolenghi. Now it has opened another café behind the City Chambers ‘serving up home baked goodness to Merchant City’. Despite the rents and rates in this neighbourhood, Singl-end needn’t be costly just as long as you show some restraint. Organic porridge with milk is only £4.50, although you add on £1 each for a sprinkling of seed mix, nuts, poached fruit, honey, and maple syrup. Personally, I want all of those, but I’m too tight to pay £9.50 for porridge when I can do my own breakfast thing at home.

Yet I wouldn’t make my own sausages, and here at Singl-End they do, meaty, filling pork and fennel ones that arrive conveniently crumbled and packed snugly in a roasting hot skillet with two eggs, just turning opaque and no more, in their bubbling bed of soft cannellini beans stewed in a fresh, sharp tomato and chilli sauce. I’m liking the sweet potato and almond bread, one of Singl-end’s speciality offerings: they might just be a hipster version of potato scones.

Singl-end’s light, slightly yellowish Altamura bread suits its ‘lunchtime special’ treatment- lunch is not quite dead in the water yet- as a croque monsieur. The ham inside is soft, natural, and home cooked, the whole thing oozes a mustardy Béchamel with cheesy strings of sweet, nutty-tasting Gruyère. I’d prefer this brasserie classic done thinner, flatter, and toastier, but with this bread, this ham, this cheese, it’s streets ahead of most of its namesakes.

I’m not bowled over by Singl-end’s take on eggs Florentine, a stack of roasted sweet potato, spinach, and red onion with an avocado, cashew, and tarragon ‘Hollandaise’. The eggs are overcooked, the spinach needs salt and hasn’t been dried off enough so it’s leaking green water incontinently over the plate making a mush of the capable sourdough, and like so many avocado innovations, the sauce is bland. And where’s the tarragon?

Singl-end’s cakes are highly effective traffic stoppers. So we succumb to the fig, raspberry, pistachio, and cream cheese cake with its zesty lime, and its Millionaire’s shortbread, which looks as sophisticated as the classiest French gateau Opera. Its unapologetically dark chocolate topping holds its own against the buttery caramel layer, the rough crumbly base adds grit. I love the cognitive dissonance of modern brunch places. You eat something supposedly health enhancing then instantly set about undoing any good you did yourself. I fall for it every time.