The Gate is the best vegetarian restaurant in London. It says so on the website. So as we woke up on Saturday we knew we had to go. Also the Marylebone location was close to our hotel and serves a brunch menu from nine on Saturday. With convenience like that who can argue?

We had the entire beautifully decorated, not-a-hair-out-of-place restaurant to ourselves which kind of makes what happens next really embarrassing. I ordered the shakshuka (or rather Kate ordered it because my lisp won’t let me say that many ‘sh’ sounds in a row). Its description in the menu begins with ‘scrambled tofu seasoned with turmeric’ and ends with ‘replace tofu with poached organic egg – not vegan’ in parentheses.

You can tell what happened right? I thought that the dish made with tofu was standard, the waiter thought the dish made with egg was standard and so I ended up with poached eggs. I apologised, he took it back, and eventually a second, tofu topped dish appeared. It was delicious, if somewhat ruined by awkwardness.

Kate, meanwhile, was enjoying a lovely stack of banana and berry pancakes. Which probably had enough fruit to count as one of her five a day (right?). Kate liked her pancakes but she loved her almond hot chocolate. She took one sip and basically swooned. It was rich, thick, creamy, and decadently dessert-like.

Do we recommend going to The Gate for brunch? Well it is pretty poor that my order got messed up when we were the only ones in there but mistakes happen and they did correct it. The food was good, the hot chocolate great and it was still cheaper than the (not remotely vegan) continental breakfast at our hotel. So yeah, why not?