The Fat Mermaid

It's Friday morning, my partner's working and my daughter is staying over at my mother's place. After a demanding and hectic academic year last year, I've allowed myself a four-week holiday, so I'm at home with Billie Stormzy, just hanging around, enjoying the lack of pressure. The weather his hot: a heatwave is hitting the Netherlands and has lasted for more than a week already - the worrying side-effect of climate change. Around nine o'clock, however, it's still pleasant, especially because of a soothing breeze that's blowing over the Scheveningen Boulevard.

New measures have been taken to prevent the spread of Covid-19, after there's been a new spike in cases recently. Those who said, in spring, that with the coming of summer the virus would all but disappear, just as the flu virus, have been proven tragically wrong. One of those measures is that you have to register before entering a restaurant or café. There's a list lying in front of the Fat Mermaid, the beachclub that we're having our breakfast at this morming, where I can put down my name and phone number. The idea is that if they find out there've been people with corona here, they can contact everybody who's been at the same place at the same time, so that they can be tested. I clean my hands using a little pump disensing sanitizer and we enter. 

There's nobody yet at the terrace, except for staff busy cleaning the glass windows of the fence surrounding the beach club. I pick a place at a verandah-like part in front of the beach-club proper, a kind of porch with low couches looking out over the sea. The Fat Mermaid is a bit of an outlier along the Scheveningen Boulevard. With an atmosphere quite distinct from your average beach club, a wonderful interior design - that very much looks accidental, but on closer inspection certainly isn't - and a brilliant sound system, this is one of the best places to go on the Scheveningen beach. From the beatifully designed logo - with a not particularly fat mermaid, actually - down to the paper menu with well-drawn pictures and, for some reason, Japanese translations of some lines, everything looks good here without giving the air of having been meticulously planned. And then there is the music: a brilliant mix of old reggae, afrobeats and obscure soul, funk and disco records.

I pick the set breakfast - ominously named "The Fat Breakfast" - and sit back to enjoy the view. Preparations for the day are in full swing: waitresses are sweeping the terrace, distributing salt and pepper among the tables and cleaning stuff. A young assitant is folding napkins. Apparently, he's spotted a huge wasp, because much of his conversation with his manager - a cheerful, no-nonsense, tattood blond woman - is about whether it might hurt him or not. They peek carefully in the bucket where the wasp has settled and wonder why it won't move anymore. "Just don't anger it," she tells him, before proceeding to sweep the terrace. Meanwhile, a bumblebee has settled on the flowers o

n the table in front of me, which makes me take notice of the fact that these are real flowers instead of fake, which is normally the case. 

Billie Stormzy is playing with some toys I brought, his favourites: a plastic ball filled with water containing a unicorn and glitters, and a wooden car. Soon, however, he's tries to climb down, stepping through the wooden railing that separates the verandah from the rest of the terrace. I help him a bit so that he doesn't flal down. He immediately heads for a football that he's spotted a bit further away. I follow him and we play football - me kicking the ball with my foot, while he crawls after it. It's a good thing my partner bought some knee protection for him recently, because he crawls a lot these days. He reall enjoys our ball game, laughing out loudly and cheerfully following the ball wherever I kick it. Then, the waitress waves at me as a sign that breakfast is served.

There's no doubt about it: The Fat Mermaid serves the best breakfast that I've had so far this summer. €15 will buy you cheese, salami, eggs, salmon, thick yoghurt filled with delicious muesli and honey, jam, croissant, orange juice, croissant, some salad, bread and a hot drink. It all tastes excellent, from the salami - a welcome change from the regular ham that is served with breakfasts at the beach clubs aroun dhere - to the salmon (which I normally really am not a fan of). What's also really good is that the amount of stuff to put on your bread matches the actual amount of bread slices offered - which is rare. The bread is also really good, freshly baked and tasty, an opinion I share with Billie Stormzy, who really relishes the piece of bread I give him, quietly enjoying it while sitting next to me on the couch. My only, tiny piece of criticism would be that the salad is drowned a bit in dressing, which I find unnecessary - but is so common in the Netherlands that you can hardly hold this against the Fat Mermaid. Other than that, this is just really, really good and my fondness for this beach club - which I already recommned to anyone looking for a place to go in Scheveningen in the evenings - has increased significantly with this breakfast. 

Billie Stormzy is already wearing his swimsuit. The idea is that we will go and have a swim after breakfast. He loves crawling around in the sea, and you have to be careful because without hesitation he will set off right into the surf. However, I am quite drowsy and decide I will have a coffee first. I ask the waitress whether they have oatmilk, which she confirms, so I ask for a latte macchiato with oatmilk - she nods - and, if possible, an extra shot of coffee.
"In that case," she replies "isn't it an idea to have..."
"A flat white?" I say. She nods again. "Quite right," I tell her. "A flat white, please."
Whether a latte macchiato with an extra shot is the same as a flat white is open to debate. When I used to go with my best friend to his chemo therapy in Amsterdam every three weeks, we would always stop by a truly excellent coffee place run by quite a character, the inventor of an app that would allow you to order your coffee before picking  it up, but who refused to make this app into the commercial success it could inevitably be, because he dreaded the hard work and tough business approach that would imply. Often when I ordered my regular coffee - a latte macchiato with an extra shot - the guy who ran this place would remark, "so, a flat white, then", after which he'd get into a heated argument with my friend, a coffee enthusiast himself, about whether that's true or not.

Whatever the case, the coffee is as great as the breakfast. Getting oatmilk to taste good in a café latte is a trick not many barristas understand, but they get it here at The Fat Mermaid. What a wonderful way to start what is shaping up to be a wonderful day! After finishing my coffee, I pay, and Billie Stormzy and I head for the waves. 

Also on Breakfast at the Beach: Jump back in time to when Rihanna Gaga and I visited this place in 2016