LDRxLDN: making peace with avocado on sourdough bread

Dear all, please help me make sense of one enigma. I am frankly puzzled by the worldwide obsession with... avocado on sourdough. I thought people were taking things too far when celebrity chefs were teaching us to "drape" avocado over toast or when social media was inflamed at the introduction of an avocado emoji, but this - paying £12 or Rs 500 for this avocado on hipster bread thing - is something of an unintelligible mystery to me. So this time, when I went to London, I decided to see what the hype was about.

I gave avocado on toast a go before and after our return from Wriggly Tin. There was clearly no better place to start than in Hackney/Shoreditch, the East London paradise for hipsters and all things bearded and gentrified.

After our glorious sunrise breakfast at the Darwin Brasserie in Bank, I went all Hobbit and opted for second breakfast (bad idea). I had planned a much-anticipated reunion with Matt, the linchpin of One Young World. If you haven't heard of One Young World yet, have a look: it's one of the most interesting platforms for young changemakers out there, which puts the glam in activism.

We meandered the streets of Broadway market and eventually turned into Market Café where we ordered, between us, salad, a reuben sandwich, coffee and... cocktails. Thank you London for making alcohol at 10am seem stylish.

The alcohol helped make the avocado on toast bearable. On second thoughts no, the avo made me angry. Superfood my ***. It seemed to me that since the Australians couldn't take over the world with their armies of koalas, aiming to reduce human brains to mush with cuteness overload, they decided to try something more sinister, and that's why we have avocado on toast on every frigging menu in London. I hope I don't see the invasion spread to Mauritius. That would be it.

I fought valiantly with the bread that couldn't decide if it was crusty or chewy, tried to do justice to the smashed avocado, and ultimately resigned myself to ingesting coffee and the grapefruit-and-cucumber cocktail to make sense of it all. All in all, this disturbing avocado on toast trend isn't for me at all. Sorry.

So this was my pre-Wriggly tin assessment of avo on toast. When we got back from the trip, I had a couple of free hours before taking my flight back to Mauritius, so I decided to put it to good use by wandering the pretty pastel streets of Notting Hill. In desperate need of coffee, we made a pit stop at Farm Girl café.

A cute, buzzing, packed little place tucked away on Portobello Road. It is perfectly located to allow voyagers on a quest through the antiques of Portobello Road to fuel up with coffee and healthy offerings... Including avo on toast. Which is what the server recommended. Brain-dead, we said yes. And called up a storm.

Turmeric latte and salad next to buckwheat pancakes with berries and pistachios, drizzled in maple syrup (or agave, this is the kind of place which offers acai bowls and homemade chlorophyll, whatever that may be!)

The berry coulis was tart, slightly sour and complemented the sweet syrup and fluffy texture of the buckwheat pancake. It went well with the café's signature coffee, the Rose Latte. Coffee flavoured with rose: I've never had anything like it and it was actually pleasant! (My other half tried the turmeric latte - not too bad either.)

And to go with that, I succumbed to the server's recommendation: the avo on toast. Let's say I wanted to be open-minded about it and have a counter-factual to the one I'd tried in Shoreditch. It came with a hint of lemon, coriander and pomegranate. Fresh, with the added sweetness of the pomegranate, it wasn't too bad.

Apparently, social media aficionados and bloggers queue for hours to get a spot here, or more particularly, at their pretty pink tables. Mental. We grabbed a seat after a few minutes. Enjoying the food, enjoying each other's company and making the most of the little time we had before I took the flight home.

As for avocado on toast? I have no doubt that I will continue having it at home; I just don't think I'll tolerate spending a ludicrous amount ordering it in a resto or café though. The hype around it still feels strange. In this case, the pancakes and the coffee were a winner; the perfect combo - slightly out there, rather healthy - helping take the edge off that feeling of anticlimax post-glamping. I recommend them.