The Bag Lady Variety

The name is literal. Before The Bag Lady Variety was a café, there was an actual bag lady — one person carrying brown-bag lunches across London's Woodfield to office workers who had come to count on them, until the habit outgrew a hand-delivery route and took a storefront on Pall Mall Street. What sits there now is a brunch café built inside a working variety store: eggs and French toast served among trinkets, antiques, and the kind of kitschy vintage clutter most kitchens would have cleared out years ago. Here it is the point. Rotary phones, old Pop-Tarts boxes, shelves of salvaged memorabilia — a meal arrives with something to read in every direction.

French toast is the house specialty, and the kitchen treats it as a canvas rather than a default. The Mojo layers cinnamon sourdough with crunchy peanut butter, banana, and honey, then finishes it with strawberries, blueberries, and syrup on the side — a sweet plate with enough texture to dodge the dessert-for-breakfast trap. The Cinnamon Swirl version starts from a freshly baked cinnamon roll. The savoury column carries equal weight: the OG Breakfast Panini folds scrambled eggs, bacon, baby spinach, and sun-dried tomato pesto mayonnaise into grilled ciabatta, while the Bag Lady Poutine reworks the Canadian standard with fried sweet-and-white potatoes under mozzarella, cheddar, and hollandaise. For a table that has come hungry, Bag Daddy's Big Stack piles sourdough French toast with eggs, Swiss, honey ham, maple bacon, tomato, avocado, and hollandaise into a single order. The Rolo Breakfast keeps a plainer lane — eggs, bacon, home fries, and a fresh-baked croissant — for anyone who wants the classics.

Read the menu and a sensibility emerges: generous, nostalgic, and unembarrassed about it. The playful naming — Bexy's Bagel, the Rolo Breakfast, the Bag Lady Brownie — signals a kitchen having fun, and the portions back the joke up rather than undercut it. The baking is done in house, the coffee comes from Las Chicas Del Cafe, and the seasonal fruit cup lands loaded enough to balance a table that has otherwise ordered hollandaise three ways. Vegetarians do fine here too, swapping tomato or avocado into the sandwiches and leaning on the French toast and the fruit. The decor and the plates pull in the same direction — comfort food staged inside a memory — and it draws the regulars who treat a Saturday breakfast as a standing appointment.

Jane Beattie opened the café in January 2009, and by local accounts it grew from those bagged office lunches into a Woodfield mainstay over the years that followed. In the summer of 2025 she sold the café and the building to Keira Curtis-Holden and Michael Holden, London-born siblings who bought it with no intention of remaking it. They kept the name, the vintage character, and the long-time staff, and widened the edges instead — longer hours, a growing weekday catering trade, a fresh liquor licence, and a patio still to come.

The newest chapter is hidden in back. In early January 2026 the owners opened the Off Licence Pub, a tucked-away Irish bar reached through the café itself — Guinness on the line, Irish stew, toasties, and a spice bag on the menu, the doors open Wednesday evening through Sunday once the brunch counter up front has gone quiet for the day. Michael Holden calls it a small piece of Irish culture, and it gives one Pall Mall Street address two clocks: French toast in daylight, a pint after dark. Thursdays fill up at lunch, Wednesday carries a wine special, and the weekend nights run busiest of all — a rhythm that lets the two sides share a single door without crowding each other. None of it displaces what Beattie started. The siblings took over something the neighbourhood asked them to leave alone, and what they set out to protect, by the family's own account, was simple — a good happy place.