Why Harbour Cafes Do Breakfast Better

There is a particular kind of morning that only happens on the coast. The light comes in low and horizontal, the gulls are already arguing, and somewhere between the chandlery and the lifeboat station there is a cafe with its door propped open and a smell of bacon drifting down the pontoon. Harbour cafes are not trying to be restaurants. They are trying to feed people who have been up since five, and that is exactly why they are so good at it.

What makes them different from a town centre greasy spoon is mostly the view and the clientele. You will be sitting between a fisherman who has already done a shift and a couple in walking boots who have not yet decided where they are going. Nobody is rushing you. The tea comes in a mug you could stand a spoon up in, and the toast arrives with a little dish of butter that has been out of the fridge long enough to actually spread.

The Full Cooked Breakfast, Coastal Edition

The full English is the anchor of any harbour cafe menu, but the coastal versions have their own small quirks worth knowing about. In the West Country you will often find hog's pudding alongside the bacon, a coarse herby sausage that is far better than it sounds. In Scotland, expect a tattie scone and possibly white pudding; in the north east, a bit of pease pudding is not unusual. In Wales, laverbread sometimes turns up fried with the bacon, which is a genuinely excellent thing to try at least once.

What to look for in a proper one:

• Eggs cooked to order — if they are sitting in a tray under a lamp, walk on.
• Real bacon, back not streaky, with a bit of fat that has been rendered properly rather than waved at a hot plate.
• Toast that arrives separately, so it has not gone soggy under the beans.
• A proper pot of tea, not a mug of vaguely brown water with the bag still in it.
• Sausages with some texture, ideally from a butcher you could walk to.

Expect to pay somewhere between £8 and £13 depending on how far you are from a city. Anything under a tenner with a sea view is a bargain; anything over £15 had better include something smoked on the premises.

Bacon Baps and the Art of Eating Outdoors

The bacon bap is the true test of a harbour cafe. It should be soft, floury, and slightly flattened by the weight of what is inside it. The bacon should be cooked until the fat is crisp at the edges, and there should be either butter or brown sauce, not both, unless you specifically ask. If the cafe offers a choice between a bap and a roll, take the bap every time; a crusty roll will shred the roof of your mouth before you have made it to the end of the pier.

These are the things worth eating standing up, leaning on a railing, watching a boat come in. Add a paper cup of tea and you have breakfast for about £5. Some cafes will do a "breakfast bap" with sausage, bacon and egg together, which is a fine thing after a long walk but a mistake if you are about to get in a car.

Two practical notes. First, check the opening time before you set off, because many harbour cafes shut by two in the afternoon and some do not open at all on Mondays or Tuesdays outside the season. Second, cash still matters in a surprising number of them, particularly the smaller ones run out of a hut or a converted store.

Tea, Coffee and the Small Rituals

Tea in a harbour cafe is a ritual rather than a beverage. It arrives as a pot, a strainer if you are lucky, and a jug of milk that is usually semi-skimmed and always slightly too cold. Order it as "a pot of tea for two" and you will get two cups and enough for about four. This is normal and you should not complain.

Coffee has improved enormously along the coast in the last decade. Plenty of harbour cafes now pull a decent flat white, often roasted somewhere within fifty miles. But there is no shame in tea. If you are sitting outside in a stiff breeze, tea stays hot longer and holds its flavour better than coffee does.

A few other things worth ordering when you see them:

• Kippers, if the cafe smokes its own or buys from a local smokehouse — a proper coastal breakfast and increasingly hard to find.
• Welsh cakes or Staffordshire oatcakes, depending on which coast you are on.
• Crab or smoked haddock in a scrambled egg, which sounds extravagant at nine in the morning and is worth every penny.
• Doorstop toast with marmalade, the cheapest good breakfast on any harbour front.

Making a Morning of It

Arrive early. The best harbour cafes fill up between half eight and ten, and the tables by the window go first. If you can, walk a stretch of the harbour wall before you eat rather than after, because the light is better and you will have earned it.

Take a layer you can take off, since harbour fronts are windy even in July. Bring cash as a backup. And if the cafe is busy and the staff are brisk with you, do not take it personally — they have been on their feet since six and they are doing you a favour by staying open at all in February.

The pleasure of a harbour breakfast is not really the food, good as it often is. It is the half hour of sitting still while the tide does something slow and the town wakes up around you. Find a bench, hold your bap, and let the morning take its time.