“HELLO SAUSAGE” is what you are greeted with as you enter Bangers, Shoreditch’s newest bricks and mortar breakfast bar. It’s vibrant, it’s cosy, and it smells fantastic.
Bangers opened the doors to their new location in May 2024, and they haven’t looked back since. Operating seven days a week from early morning to early afternoon, their breakfast menu is going down a treat with the local clientele. Think of the best breakfast bun you’ve ever had, combine it with your favourite fry-up, and now chuck in some of the best available local and seasonal produce.
Making their own crispy hashbrowns, delicious baked beans, and homemade batches of ketchup, brown sauce and chilli sauce, the Bangers breakfast has set a new standard for the hearty British brekkie we know. And those are just the sides – their breakfast buns are the Real Deal™. Having taken inspiration from smashed burgers, Bangers have somehow conjured up a more elegant, sexier version of the sausage breakfast sarnie with their very own smashed sausage buns.
We tried their signature breakfast bun – the ORIGINAL – made with smashed, free-range pork sausage sourced from London’s leading free-range and organic butchers, a fried egg from Clarence Court, melted Red Leicester cheese and a choice of homemade sauces, in a toasted English muffin or a brioche bun from Spence Bakery. We opted for the latter, and it blew our socks right off. We also tried the VEGGIE, made with plant-based sausage, with their green chilli sauce inside an English muffin, alongside a strong cup of Allpress coffee (roasted just a couple of miles up the road) to round off a hearty breakfast.
It was with a full belly and a bounce in our step that we caught up with Bangers co-founder Will Rhys over the phone. Alongside Will Mogoseanu, the pair began their journey with Bangers by providing their excellent quality, hearty breakfasts at festivals for hungry crowds looking for something to help them start their day on the right foot. After a while, it became clear there was a demand for this sort of elevated, easy breakfast food and, since they were already used to operating in small kitchen spaces, they decided to start a delivery-only service. Thus, Bangers was truly born.
“It was a very organic transition,” Will told Hawkker, when asked about the evolution from a dark kitchen to a fully-functioning breakfast bar. “We made sure to consistently serve really good food, and because this kind of food is quite a niche, our customer base built slowly with word of mouth.” Wanting to nail their proof of concept, the pair went about London running several pop-up events over the next couple of years, including one with Allpress in Dalston, which went a long way towards gaining them a deeper understanding of their product, and exactly what people were, quite literally, hungry for.
“From there, we just stuck at it. Eventually, our team of five outgrew our 3x3m dark kitchen, and we knew we could afford a bigger space because the product was selling so well.” With the business’s solid initial profits, and after a friends and family round and Kickstarter, they had what they needed to secure and open their current site at the heart of Shoreditch, in Mark’s Square.
Rhys and Mogoseanu met at university, and had each been working in different aspects of the food industry: Rhys in branding, and Mogoseneau in restaurants, including St Barts and Fenn & Harlequin. Having stayed in touch, it was during the pandemic that the pair reconnected over their desire to create something of their own. The goal was always to work towards opening a physical site, with the idea to create a place that busy Londoners could come to, to start their day “the right way”. They wanted their customers to feel drawn back to this warm place in the mornings, with great food, music, and coffee, and to leave with a smile, whether they were taking away or sitting in.
As our conversation came to a close, Will reflected on the price of building one’s own food business within a rich, saturated culinary landscape like London’s. “You have to work hard for every pound,” he tells us, calmly working a shift in the kitchen during our interview. And he does.
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