We ate a lasagne in a sandwich and plenty more at The Breakfast Club

The Lasandwich is not only a portmanteau to rival Brangelina, Billary and brunch, it’s now on the new menu at Brighton’s Breakfast Club.

A rarely seen combo of pasta and bread, it seemed like it something that might have been chomped on by peerless and food-fearless TV mobster Tony Soprano or a similarly mythical bear-like Italian-American.

On the subject of bears, we chose the perfect evening to try the above at the Market Street venue, the night before Brighton Pride…

Even on the Thursday before the fun, a sun-soaked Brighton was filling up with Pride Weekenders dragging along their cases on wheels, and already showing more flesh than fabric.

The Breakfast Club was more than ready and had booked drag singer and all-round starlet Cosmic, to dole out prizes aplenty in a few pre-Pride games of Bingo (‘He’s got a nice bum – 41 etc).

In a remarkably buzzy atmos for 7pm the cocktails were flowing and were backed up with rounds of complimentary shots.

Your reviewer was in the company of an impressionable teen on his school hols, so tried to maintain a modicum of decorum and politely refused most of the shots.

We kicked off with some frickles (another good portmanteau), mostly because the young tyro hadn’t heard of deep-fried pickles, and a monstrously indulgent vanilla milkshake for him (with five scoops of ice cream) and a Peach Island Ice Tea (with five types of alcohol) for the only moderately responsible adult.

At this point in proceedings we noticed the restaurant’s whopping great cocktail prep area where a team of mixologists were doing their thing amid a myriad of spirits, mixers, fruits and syrups.

Brighton has never been short of cocker-tail or two but the city’s post-lockdown night-time economy is increasingly powered by fabulously mixed liquors.

Accordingly The Breakfast Club showed no sign of bucking the trend and some of the diners were doing their best to make the most of the restaurant’s Bottomless Boozy Nights offer (a reasonable £25 for any main dish and 90 minutes of beer, prosecco, white peach sangria or Aperol).

My peach creation was a beaut, with the fruits and Coke doing an impressive job of taking the edge of a bevy of booze, so much so that I barely taste the grog but obviously wouldn’t wanted to have operated any heavy machinery soon after.

Because the idea of a slab of creamy pasta inside thick bread clearly didn’t seem like it would be enough food, we ordered some loaded fries and some sweetcorn cobs.

The buffalo loaded fries were heaving with flavour, as befits chippies covered in delish chunks of southern-fried chicken, buffalo sauce, harissa cheese sauce and blue cheese and celery pico de gaio.

And the cobs, roasted in garlic and chilli butter, even garnered grudging respect from the teen, whose antipathy to vegetables is unyielding.

In truth none of the above were necessary when confronted with the lasandwich. A behemoth in bread, a colossus in ciabatta.

The veggie lasagne was made up of layers of fresh egg pasta filled with a tomato sauce and a triple cheese sauce, and a surprising amount of veg – courgette, aubergine (or perhaps we should say zucchini and egg-plant when discussing this beast because it seems instinctively more American than Italian) and spinach (I don’t think they have a funny name for spinach).

It was almost a balanced dish, and initially the abundance of spinach made me think I could conquer the double-carb dish.

The first few hundred bites were by far the best, it was creamy, it’s well put together, and fun.

Your reviewer is no shrinking violet when it comes to portions but was soon hit by the realisation he wouldn’t be able to eating the whole thing in one sitting.

But that’s what doggie bags are for and happily the carb-loading rolled on to another day.

Amid the minor carbohydrate crisis my dining chum made his way through the smouldering slow-burn of the birria sandwich, a bun full of spicy slow-cooked pulled beef, pepper-jack cheese, caramelised onions, jalapenos, and some zingy lime-cured red cabbage to nicely lift the meat and diary.

All of this, and another cocktail and shake round (a perky Breakfast Mai Tia and a Chocalicious respectively), meant that pudding was no longer an option, and the Nutella pancakes would have to wait until another day.

Hopefully that day will come fairly soon.

To find out more visit

https://thebreakfastclubcafes.com/brighton/