Symmetry Breakfast: The Most Important Meal of the Day

Symmetry Breakfast: The Most Important Meal of the Day

Three years, 800 breakfasts and over half a million followers later, Symmetry Breakfast has become one of the most recognised names on Instagram. We visit Michael at his Dalston home, bright and early for a taste of one of his breakfast specials.



In
2013, Michael Zee started making breakfast for his
boyfriend, Mark van Beek. Mark was working “extortionate” hours at
his job as a menswear designer and the two found their time
together limited. Breakfast became a sacred time of day, when the
two could bask in each other’s company for a while. One morning,
Michael took a snap of their matching dishes on his iPhone and
posted it online.

Three years, 800 breakfasts and over half a million followers
later, Symmetry Breakfast has become one of
the most recognised names on Instagram. Even the app’s co-founder,
Kevin Systrom, recently named Symmetry Breakfast his favourite
account.

Scrolling through the Symmetry Breakfast archives, it’s easy to
see why the account has drummed up such global delight. Pimento
waffles with caviar and dill, baked eggs with turkey and crème
fraîche, madeleines with raspberries, squid ink bagels with
beetroot juice, tear-apart cinnamon Danish pastry, croque madame
with fries…each morning brings a dish more mouthwatering than the
last. They are all cooked by Michael, who lives and breathes
breakfast-time: “I go to bed thinking about breakfast.”


We visit Michael at his Dalston home, bright and early. He
ushers us into the kitchen, where two spinach and cheese pides (a
Turkish pizza of sorts) are resting on top of the oven. “Eat them!”
he commands, as we eye them up like two deranged walruses. As we
inhale the soft dough and creamy filling, Michael sets to work on
the rest of our breakfast. He rustles us up two skillets of sweet
potato frittata with creamy goats’ cheese and crispy sage,
sprinkled with sea salt. He serves them with a hunk of E5 Bakehouse
walnut bread, two little pots of toasted argan oil and a couple
glasses of homemade carrot and apple juice. As we eat he tells us
about his travels, his favourite places to eat and how he worked in
his father’s Chinese restaurant while growing up in Liverpool. He
is a force of energy, warmth and knowledge, his conversation
interjected with the odd burst of throaty laughter. He is the
perfect breakfast host. We conspire how to make him our best
friend. Michael describes the unintended beginnings of Symmetry
breakfast: “We had all this space so we made a dining room and
started sitting down to have proper breakfasts together.”

Michael describes the unintended beginnings of Symmetry
breakfast: “We had all this space so we made a dining room and
started sitting down to have proper breakfasts together.” Michael
continues, darting around his small Hackney kitchen: “We’d have this
amazing 40 minutes together eating and then he’d go to work. What
you see now isn’t how Symmetry Breakfast started – to be honest it
was just something I thought would be funny.”

“You can experiment when it comes to breakfast food,” Michael
tells us. “It is the only meal of the day that can be both sweet
and savoury.” As well as a nod towards their morning ritual,
Michael uses Symmetry Breakfast to celebrate the vast diversity of
breakfast foods around the world. “At any point in the day, it’s
breakfast somewhere,” Michael says. “Food is a way into
culture.”


He has experimented with everything – Basque country-inspired
breakfast pintxos, Hawaiian-style toast with spam and papaya,
Venezuelan sweet corn pancakes with shredded beef, Hong Kong egg
waffles and North Indian chickpea dal with mango lassis. “The food
of different cultures – not just countries – is something I want to
talk about as much as possible,” he tells us.

Until recently, Michael – who has studied photography, worked as
an art teacher and managed a high street sneaker shop – was working
as an educational officer at the V&A. He was still working at
the gallery when Symmetry Breakfast began blowing up. He is now in
the process of filling up the pages of his first book,
Cook-Love-Share, a collection of his most prized breakfast recipes.
He says he takes very little notice of preachy food trends. “So
many of the recipes in the book begin with ‘pre-heat your deep fat
fryer’, and the two smoothies in there have vodka in them!”

Though his beauteous account may suggest otherwise, Michael is
no snob when it comes to food. “I love a good greasy spoon.
Sometimes Mark and I just want a burger at 9AM,” he says proudly.
“My biggest Achilles heel is KFC. I think it’s quite disingenuous
for people to be snobby about food when they’ve never tasted poor
quality food.” He goes on to tell us that he was raised on boxed
food, though his mother occasionally cooked from scratch: “There’s
something nice about instant coffee and macaroni cheese out of a
box.”


This is probably what is so attractive about the Symmetry
Breakfast brand. Michael is as comfortable serving cornflakes (it
was his breakfast of choice to celebrate hitting half a million
followers) as he is serving homemade pulled pork buns with chilli
honey, watermelon and emperor’s breakfast tea.

Surely there are anxieties attached to working in such a
fluctuating medium as Instagram? “The internet is global, so it is
full of differing opinions. It definitely cranks up the pressure,”
Michael says. “There are a lot of eyes on you. You suddenly have a
platform and it becomes political.”


With his Instagram account, which continues to grow in
popularity with each day, Michael is proving the power of social
media, sparking a love of breakfast time and again. Michael gets up
every morning and prepares beautiful, creative dishes for his
boyfriend. For them, Symmetry Breakfast is about displaying the
colour, flavour and social importance of food, something they share
every morning of the year. “I go to a lot of effort to make
breakfast,” Michael says, clearing away the table. “Some days I
nail it and some days it looks a bit shitty. But that’s life. Well,
it’s my life! At the end of the day, Symmetry Breakfast is my
diary. That’s what social media is about – recording the
everyday.”

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