Peyton and Byrne

A really bland and barely toasted tea cake — I’ve had way tastier from supermarket shelves — and a tiny coffee served on paper plates and cups in quite a depressing atmosphere all for a very overpriced £4.70 to eat in. A take away croissant from the M&S bakery to eat on the train with a decent sized coffee would have been way more enjoyable and easier on the purse. Left feeling very ripped off so will stick to Benugo or M&S next time.

I’m giving them 4 stars because they have one of the most amazing carrot cakes I have ever tried!
I spend a lot of time in St. Pancras Station and I keep trying the different coffee shops and restaurants around and it was obvious Peyton and Byrne was going to be next soon. The nice display you can see from the window was Unilocaling at me!
The thing you first notice when you look at the shop are the cakes and cupcakes. They also have a small selection of salad and savoury foods, but that was not my choice when I visit.
I had a Latte and some carrot cake and even though the coffee was not the best (not the worst either), the cake was AMAZING! It just tastes so good and, important for me, it didn’t have raisins!
I have also tried some other cakes from them: Strawberry and pistachio tower (I suppose it was quite good, but since I don’t like strawberries I can’t be positive about it), Lemon Meringue (that was actually quite good as well, sweet but not in excess and with the right amount of citric) and the fairy cakes (sorry Peyton, you are not my first option for them!)
The staff is willing to help and if you are lucky enough to be around when they are closing, you could get some cupcakes for free!
Overall, a good place to have coffee and sweets for it’s price, it it wasn’t for the constant cold at the Station!

Visited Peyton & Bryne this morning on my way to work. Thought I’d have a cup of tea and slice of toast. Wish I had kept on walking!
Having waited some time I was offered a very grubby tray with what I thought was a small tub of butter and a a small tub a jam and a plastic fork. After looking at the girl behind the counter and asked ‘Is that really my tray!?’ she quickly replaced it for a clean one (not too much to ask I don’t think). Once my toast did arrive I collect my coffee and went and sat down. Only to discover that what I thought was butter and jam was in fact cream and not butter! I said to the girl that she had made a mistake and this was cream and not butter. She replied no there is no mistake and that it is cream. Cream, Jam and toast!!! Have you ever heard of such a thing! This is ridiculous. In all my years I’ve never heard of such a thing. I said no please can I have some butter. Some minutes pasted and the butter arrived in a small pot, rock hard. Meanwhile my toast was stone cold! Very disappointing. Such a lovely looking shop too! The best I can say is — nice cup of coffee, that’s it.
Looking at other reviews on the web looks like Peyton & Bryne don’t seem to care much. No responses to any of them

I got the most gorgeous pistachio and berry and chocolate cake from here. I was going to get the giant one but then common sense prevailed and I just got the mini portion. Can’t wait til the next birthday in the family so I can go along and get another! :D

Pour les petits français qui viennent de débarquer à Londres, ou qui quittent nos amis British, né vous laissez pas avoir par le visuel adorable de la boutique et même des pâtisseries. Quelle grosse déception !
Des cupcakes mignons, des gâteaux alléchants, une ambiance admirable et une absence totale de gout.
Oui, mon cupcake pistache/​chocolat et mon cheesecake Rhubarbe étaient fades à souhait, pas mauvais, juste sans aucun intérêt.
Le chocolat chaud qui me faisait tant envie était brulant et sans gout, encore une fois.
Bref, passez votre chemin.
Bloody Hell

I love sweets and I love cupcakes — I love the sugary taste of the creamy crown. Above all, I like the look of these colourful cakes. And this is what Peyton & Byrne does best. This hasn’t been the first time that I have been lured into Peyton and Byrne by their lovely display. Again — I ordered a cupcake, Frou Frou Fairy Cake, and again I was awfully disappointed. As mentioned I like sugary sweets but P&B cupcakes all taste similar, far too sugary, far too much icing so that you cannot possibly eat it as a whole. I always finish what I order, but, this cupcake I couldn’t finish. I also find the prices rather expensive. Today, with my cupcake, I ordered Camomile tea, the price for tea was pretty standard but I got it in a tiny, white paper cup and all on a tray. A nice looking bakery, turned into a university canteen without the prices. Next time, I must resist the window display.

Try the gluten free chocolate cake. Very good. They also do very good coffee. One of the better KX outfits.

I am afraid their cup cakes and pastries will be the death of me. When I worked across the road I always had to buy for the rest of the office. We could never decide what was best, so it was one of everything. The cakes hardly ever made it home. Too good to put down.

Bad day to start a healthy eating week and then end up here – luckily I was able to resist a cupcake and settled for strawberries and yogurt. What I love love love about this place is the packaging. Great canisters, great labels – I just want to buy everything on the pretty factor. I wish I could have commented on the cakes!!!

This place has a Fantastic range of cakes and pastries as well as some great salads, sandwiches and hot snacks — the scotch eggs are well worth a try.
Fantastic Victoria Sponge and the bakewell tart is to die for. All in all a tough one to decide on when you are looking for a sweet treat.

As a regular user of the British Library I am sometimes forced to get my food from P&B (for example when I oversleep and fail to prepare my coffee and lunch from home!) I say this because I find their prices a bit too high! I also don’t like their coffee and find their range of sandwiches very limited. But they do have healthy options, which is good. Their soups are tasty most of the time — I particularly love their winter vegetable soup. I also would recommend their pies! Especially the Stilton Pie. Their muffins are really good! and the desserts always looks tempting. I also like their pretty colours and decorations. The staff is nice and smiley too! So, apart from the high price you pretty much might like the place.
Caution — their mocha hot drink is too heavy! It could pass for a melted chocolate bar — scary!

I wish that San Francisco Caltrain’s station would get its act together and offer better fast food than Subway and other chain restaurants that push mediocre cardboard into our impatient American mouths. With that being said, St. Pancras Int’l has a lot to choose from when it comes to quick and cheap eats. And when I decided to stop into Peyton and Bryne for porridge, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. No, literally… I didn’t know porridge was the English term for oatmeal.
These stores are so warm and comforting with the brick and arches of the building. And even when it’s at the ass crack of dawn, these employees were still fairly cheerful and patient with me. I got a honkin’ blueberry muffin with a streusel topping, a small porridge with cinnamon and honey in a paper soup container and a cappuccino, also in a paper cup. All for 5 quid. I don’t mind putting on my own chocolate and putting in my own sugar into my coffee after the poor guy made it for me. Because essentially, that’s exactly what you have to do at Starbucks any fucking way. This was something I needed so badly on a late twenties birthday morning being spent alone and in a foreign country (turned out I loved London way more than Paris). The hot porridge was entirely too comforting with large steel cut oats and natural warming cinnamon following the taste buds down my throat. The muffin was perfectly light and fluffy, but that streusel topping giving it the perfect textural play with a crunch. And there was no rushing me out as I sat there to drink my cappuccino and read the Metro.
They had other delicious looking baked goods in the front window and great sounding pies on the menu that I simply couldn’t justify buying after waddling out of there in head of the National Gallery. But, it was a beautiful store front and really a beautiful bakery in a place I least expected to find quality. But, I learned my lesson that I should never compare anything in Europe to anything in America. We’ve still got a lot to learn.

Peyton and Byrne is like your bi-​polar friend that you can’t stop hanging out with, because they’re crazy and annoying, but also really fun.
I ventured into their St Pancras branch on my way home after a frantic Saturday of shopping. I was weary and tired, and easily enticed by their beautiful window display of cakes and treats. P&B look exactly like the Proper English Bakery of your dreams — but would my dream become reality?
I chose a slice of blueberry sponge roll, and some Earl Grey. My first rude awakening was that I was given a tray, canteen-​style (!), then instructed to go to the end of the counter to pick up my tea (!), which was served in a polystyrene cup (!!!).
POLYFREAKINGSTYRENE.
Have the people who insist in serving you drinks from polystyrene cups ever actually drunk from one? Have they heard the spine-​shuddering squeak of the labial-​thermoplastic collision? The temperature of the cup neither porcelain-​cool nor dishwasher-​hot, but horrifyingly tepid? The awful juxtaposition of hot, fragrant liquid, and dimpled, inert polymer?
OK, P&B, it’s a small shop, and you have no room for a dishwasher, ergo, no dishes… but — surely we can come to some other arrangement?
Anyway. Obviously I was pretty enraged by the polystyrene/​self-​serve situation, as it clashed so badly with the look/​promise of the place. Happily — and this is where Peyton and Byrne showcases its bi-​polar tendencies — the Earl Grey that slid so repulsively into my mouth from the awful cup, was in fact some of the most fragrant, delicate, complex and beautiful tea I’ve ever had. And I drink a lot of the stuff. INCREDIBLE TEA!
Slightly bolstered by this brave surprise, I tried a forkful of sponge roll. And oh, bliss. Light bouncy sponge, married with gorgeous fruit, and thick cream, the genius being a sprinkling of brown sugar between the jam and cream layers, to heighten the textural contrast. INCREDIBLE CAKE!
I considered holding my grudge, but the perfection of the tea and cake kept on winning me over. Oh, P&B, you crazy thing: one minute I wanna kill you, the next I could kiss you.

A branch of the excellent Peyton & Byrne cake shop/​bakery/​café at the marvellous St. Pancras station. It’s worth going just to see the station’s incredible architecture.
I bought a delicious lemon curd swiss roll for my office party, and it went down a storm. It isn’t cheap, but it isn’t crazy prices and it certainly is high quality. The design of the place and the typeface is beautiful. They do tea and cakes to eat in as well.

Situated in the very heart of the beautiful St Pancras, with a window display of cakes that literally slows the pace and turns the heads of passers by, Peyton and Byrne appears to be a bastion of englishness in a world of evil chains. A place where a gentleman can look at his pocket watch, see that its four o clock and pop in for a cup of tea and a spiffingly delicious slice of flapjack.
Sadly Peyton and Byrne turns out to be the epitome of the phrase «style over substance» The cakes look great but the taste is average. I had some treacle tart and half a blueberry muffin. I Love treacle tart for the sticky sweet taste of the treacle. This one tasted only of lemon. LEMON!!! The Muffin really shouldn’t be allowed its «muffin» billing either as its really just a fairly dry sponge in the shape of a muffin — it tasted fine but not muffin-​y enough for my liking.
The chairs here seem to have been bought from a torture chambers garage sale and are so uncomfortable that all i wanted to do was finish my food and drink and leave. Sadly this was impossible as my coffee felt as though it had been scooped from the depths of mount Etna and was undrinkable for best part of half an hour.
So to summarise if you want a burned mouth, a sore bum and disoriented taste buds then come on down, but my advise is look straight ahead and keep on walking.

Come weary traveller, behold our wondrous window display of dreamy multi coloured cup cakes, marvel at our home made everything from baguettes to beluga cheese cake, let the simple type face and clean lines sooth you before BANG!
You taste our cake of deceit and burn your tongue on our coffee of lies!
I have never felt cheated by a blueberry muffin until now.
Tescos set a very modest standard; squidgy and tastes of blueberries, not a particularly hard act to follow in the Muffin world (or Muffiverse if you will) you’d think. Apparently messyrs Peyton and Byrne have never tasted a blueberry or baked a cake before. Proper Blueberry muffins cooked to perfection by passionate, professional people in small cosy establishments SHOULD NOT BOUNCE!
In case you’re wondering, Waitrose do some of the finest blue muffs on the market… should I draw attention to the risqué abbreviation I just made? Nah, you’re clever, you’ll figure it out!

Whenever I’m waiting for a train and even when I’m not, just passing through Kings Cross I pop into Peyton and Bryne for a drink and a cake.
It’s a modern British deli style bakery selling cakes and tarts, organic breads, traditional pies, savoury tarts and freshly prepared sandwiches. You can buy cake by the slice or whole if you like and they are all really yummy. The prices are reasonable too, with cake slices at around £2.50 and I think they’re just as great as fancier/​higher priced same-​style places such as Gails. On the savoury front, the pies are delicious, especially the hand raised pork pie that you can find in the chiller cabinet. It comes with a cute little pot of organic piccalilli and totally beats a sandwich as a pre travel snack.
They also serve a selection of teas, fruit teas, coffee and hot chocolate. All the coffees also have the option of being make with soya so I usually go for a soya espresso and a muffin as when you buy a drink and a muffin together it’s only £2.50. You can perch on one of the high tables, which admittedly aren’t very comfortable, especially as you have a view into the next café that looks much nicer… but I bet the food isn’t as good!
If you do like what you try they have some lovely store cupboard items on the shelves in the middle of the shop, things like preserves and tins of loose tea/​coffee. I’m a big fan of the organic pear and chocolate spread.