London's best breakfast? Join the club

The Breakfast Club, 31 Camden Passage, N1 8EA
The Breakfast Club, 2 - 4 Rufus Street, N1 6PE
Breakfast for two with cocktails: £30

Despite growing up in a country responsible for one of the world's best breakfasts, my younger self often longed for the sort of breakfast we ate on family holidays in South Africa. French toast with syrup was the firm favourite - an exotic concept for my fledgling palate, which seemed infinitely superior to our prosaic eggy bread. However, it wasn't so much the food that enticed me, more the possibility of going out to a stylish, non-greasy place for our first meal of the day. 

While we may lead the world at frying eggs and serving them on grubby plastic tables, most of us fine English folk can probably still remember a time when a nice breakfast or brunch was hard to come by, save in hotels. Until relatively recently, one would have been forced to conclude that whilst we still excel at the fry up, our breakfast culture lacks some the sunny finesse of the antipodeans, South Africans and Americans. However, two happy meals at the Breakfast Clubs in Islington and Hoxton reminded me that there are more and more of these fabulous breakfast places opening in the capital. Their varied menus and excellent coffee could even give our faithful old artery clogger a run for its money, unless it is made by the Regency, of course.

Breakfast with a Westminster classic

The Cinnamon Club, 30-32 Great Smith Street, SW1P 4BU

Breakfast: £13 on a special offer

Located in the former home of the Westminster Library, the Cinnamon Club has an inordinate amount of old world charm: beautiful architecture, walls lined with books and thick, white linen tablecloths. For ten years now, it has been a fixture of the Westminster culinary scene, serving up refined Indian food to journalists wooing politicians in the hope of an insight into the latest intrigue. Being neither hack nor expenses-fuelled parliamentarian, I had to wait for a Time Out special offer.

Breakfast heaven: an update

Mess Cafe, 38 Amhurst Road, E8 1JN

Breakfast for two: £12 if you eat everything

Looking back, I have spent much of the second part of this year looking for a good place to have breakfast. I already knew about the brilliance of the Regency but had struggled to find anything to match up to it in East London, despite the area's long history of caff culture. It seems fitting, therefore, to end the year with a post about what may well be the best place for breakfast in Hackney: it is certainly the best place I have found so far.

Beyond bacon

Bistrotheque 

23-27 Wadeson Street, E2 9DR

Hawksmoor

157 Commercial Street, E1 6BJ

The English excel at breakfast. Granted, a freshly-baked croissant is a fine thing and huevos rancheros can be phenomenal, but a full English on a cold morning is heaven. Despite our (now largely defunct) reputation for poor cooking, our breakfasts are generally lauded for their commitment to heart-stopping awesomeness. 

Three breakfasts out East

Dalston Lane Cafe, 107C Dalston Lane, E8 1NG

The Counter Cafe, 4a Roach Road, E3 2PA

Tina, We Salute You, 47 King Henry's Walk, N1 4NH

Ever since the Forks relocated from south of the river to Hackney, we have been engaged in a long (and thus far fruitless) search for a truly great place for breakfast in our new 'hood. As previously mentioned, we both love the posh full English at Medcalf but we can't escape the feeling that there must be something just as good closer to home.  Armed only with our bikes and the authoritative work on breakfasting in London, here are the results of our most recent morning outings.

From the outside, the Dalston Lane Cafe looked like the real thing. The uninspiring shop front and checked table cloths hinted at a proper, old fashioned cafe. The food was a pleasant surprise - good quality eggs and sausages served with crusty, seedy granary bread. Not a turdy sausage or slice of plastic bread in sight. However, something about the Dalston Lane Cafe did not feel right. It is perhaps too hip for its own good. From the lacklustre service by a young man who clearly would rather have been at home working on his latest project to the prevalence of ironic hair, it has none of the charm of a proper cafe. The juxtaposition of old and new East London at the Dalston Lane Cafe served as an unwelcome reminder of what has been lost. Even though the breakfast was decent, the atmosphere was too stilted and self-consciously cool for us to contemplate adding it to our list of breakfast favourites.  

We decided to venture further east (Hackney Wick) to sample the breakfast at the Counter Cafe. Judging by the number of fixie bikes in the car park, most of its customers had chosen to cycle there. We were glad that we had too, for the cafe is well and truly off the beaten track in an industrial complex near to the south east corner of Victoria Park. It was easier to forgive the Counter Cafe its hipness because, somehow, it manages to capture the buzzing, creative atmosphere of the East rather than its uglier self-loathing arch-hipness. Table football and good music play their part in achieving this. 

The menu is reminiscent of the relaxed, sunny places scattered across the English-speaking southern hemisphere: lots of avocado and banana. The coffee was expertly made but, even with a varied range of delicious-sounding food on offer, the place somehow managed to fail to live up to its full potential. The full Counter breakfast was, to Mr Fork's mind, a bit pretentious and fiddly.  Good quality ingredients didn't quite gel into a coherent plate of food. For example, the sausage: thin chipolata-style links described by Mr F as a bit like merguez but drier and less interesting. Smoked salmon, poached eggs and potato cakes were better: perfectly cooked eggs and pleasantly-textured fish but the potato cakes would have benefited from being left a little longer in the pan. I would return if I was in the area but I am not sure I would cross Hackney again for the specific purpose of visiting.

An honourable commendation goes to Tina, We Salute You. Although it was the trendiest and least cafe-like of the three, their excellent coffee, quirky decor and fabulous jam selection wooed us.  We will definitely go back to sample their banana bread and (again) avocado-based snacks. 

Three very different breakfasts and, whilst we now know our local cafes a little better , we have yet to find breakfast perfection. But we still have the whole of Bethnal Green, Mess on Amhurst Road and the wilds around London Fields to explore. Who knows what they will bring?

The Counter Cafe on Urbanspoon

Tina, We Salute You on Urbanspoon

I heart the Regency

The Regency Cafe, 17-19 Regency Street, Westminster

Breakfast for two: £12

Returning to the Regency is like stepping back to a bygone age of cooking.  It evokes rosy feelings of an earlier time when people drank tea and ate dripping on their toast - even if that time pre-dates your own birth by a good 30 years.  There's no dripping on offer now but they will make you a liver sandwich.

Even if you have never been, you would recognise the Regency.  The white and black exterior and the plastic tables sitting under half-curtained windows have featured in advertisements and a film (Layer Cake, if you are interested). Indeed, the tea at the Regency is actually made in the same type of oversized metal pot that features in the scene.  Its famous history neither adds to nor detracts from the Regency's charm.  It has its own character and appeal that make it possibly the finest cafe in London. 

Food is ordered from the counter, which is usually manned by a formidable lady with an impressive vocal range who shouts the orders as they come out.  Beware if she appends "going cold" at the end of your order, it is a sign that you have been too slow to collect your food, marking you out as a newcomer to the Regency.  The familiarity of the staff with many of the customers suggests that there are plenty of regular visitors. On the morning of our last trip, we spotted taxi drivers, office workers from nearby Government Departments, local builders and a handful of tourists.

We were there for breakfast - a rather large affair that involved black pudding and bubble alongside the standard fare.  It was good.  The eggs were soft, the sausages herby and meaty (not those fairly meatless pink things that turn a uniform shade of brown when cooked) and the whole thing swam with baked beans. It was not the best cooked breakfast either of us had ever eaten (the jury is still out on that one, although Medcalf on Exmouth Market is a current favourite) but it was enormous, tasty and pretty cheap.  In short, everything you could want from a proper greasy spoon.

The only downside is that it keeps slightly inconvenient opening times: it closes at seven in the evening during the week, at noon on Saturday and does not open on Sundays. So, unless you happen to live or work in the area, it seems like a lot of effort just for a cafe.  That said, I think it is probably worth it. To experience a small part of London's culinary history, if nothing else.