We tried the cooked breakfast at the Bristol City cafe and it’s a match winner

Food at football grounds never used to be much to write home about. As a child of the 1970s, I can still remember standing on the terraces and enduring gristly meat pies and greasy cups of tea at Bristol City matches.

But catering at ever-improving grounds like Ashton Gate is a very different game today, with high quality street food trucks in the car park on match days and dedicated trailers dispensing Thatchers cider and Guinness.

Ashton Gate also benefits from having its own cafe, open throughout the week regardless of the fact it’s match day.

Kofi (I’m assuming it’s a play on ‘coffee’ rather than named after former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan) is open from 8am until 4pm, Monday to Friday and on match days.

It serves breakfast until 12.30pm, which is when the lunch menu kicks in with dishes like quiche of the day (£5.95) and the £5.50 ‘avo wrap’ (tortilla wrap with avocado, grilled vegetables, wild rocket and sun-dried tomatoes).

Other lunchtime offerings include jacket potatoes with a choice of two fillings (£5.95) and a range of salads for the same price.

Next to the sports store with its clothing and gifts for Bristol City, Bristol Rugby and Bristol Flyers supporters, the cafe has a mix of low and high tables with banquette seating and murals of city landmarks as well as photos of coffee plantations (the coffee served here is from Clifton Coffee and it’s excellent, as are the Canton teas served in teapots).

The morning menu is extensive and includes bagels (£5-£5.25) including scrambled eggs, oak-smoked salmon and cracked pepper) and breakfast burritos (£5).

There are vegetarian and vegan cooked ‘Kofi’ breakfasts for just £5.50 or the regular breakfast which I ordered.

At £6.95, it’s cheaper than many greasy spoon cafes around and it was cooked to order, with around a 15-minute wait on a quiet weekday morning.

Served on expensive-looking crockery, this was a cooked breakfast several notches up from the average cafe fry-up.

The beans were served in a dinky little metal pan, the potato hash was made from sweet potato and there was even an individual pot of posh Wilkin & Sons tomato ketchup on the side.

Greasy spoon purists will already be spluttering into their mugs of builders tea at the mere suggestion of those last three things.

The grilled tomato came as a thick wheel of beef tomato rather than those small, watery jobs and the toast was thickly sliced.

But it was the quality of the Burford Brown fried egg, the properly meaty sausage and a crisp rasher of top drawer bacon that marked this out as a Premier League brekkie.

This was the best quality breakfast I’ve had all year and the prices were surprisingly and refreshingly kind on the wallet.

Bristol City may have put a price tag of £25m on star player Alex Scott, but the quality of the breakfast at the club’s cafe is priceless.