Today I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a very long time: I stopped for breakfast on my way to work at Suzie’s, a roadside trailer with a bright red awning parked on a turnout near Seven Springs. Suzie’s is not of the gourmet food truck ilk that I’ve read has swept Los Angeles, but rather a standard British burger van. You can order pretty much any combination of the basic elements of a traditional British fry up, and it’s delivered in a bap (bun), which is good for absorbing the brown sauce and grease. I chose egg and tomato with a cup of tea. While Suzie cooked she chatted with another woman customer about the three chaps in plus fours leaning against their Land Rover and eating bacon butties. (Despite the fact that shooting clothes are a familiar sight this time of year, seeing them still reminds me of golfers from the 1920s.) They had apparently committed the serious offense of paying for their breakfast with large bills.
“What do you expect from someone who pays £43 to shoot a bird out of the sky,” Suzie remarked.
I checked my wallet and breathed a sigh of relief to see a £10 note, which didn’t seem too egregious for about £4 worth of breakfast. When she handed over my bap I opened it to find mushroom and tomato instead of egg and tomato. I hesitated for a moment before asking her to add an egg — I didn’t want to annoy her like the shooting party had. She did insist I had asked for mushroom and tomato, which she claimed to remember because she thought it was strange, but she was cracking the egg at the same time as defending herself so I figured she wasn’t too mad. Then she asked me where I was from and what I thought about the British weather, so I knew I was OK in Suzie’s book. And it turns out mushroom, egg, and tomato makes a good bap, good enough for Suzie’s to become a weekly tradition.