Christopher emailed me and suggested this place, and I'm very glad he did. It's fantastic. A proper working cafe with a high proportion of cabbies and high-viz jackets, but also bright, clean and airy.
Some ebcbs are all about boundaries, there are clear lines of demarkation between the different food groups. And some ebcbs are all about co-mingling, about the blending of the flavours and colours. This is one of those. The chips are golden and delicious, the egg is somehow simultaneously fluffy and soggy, which makes it marvelous, the beans are aligned like iron filings to a magnet and the bacon's comforting arms hold the whole thing together.
The infinite variety of cafe ordering systems always appeal to me. There's a fairly straightforward ticketing approach here. I'm always tempted to keep these things, start a collection, but they sit in my pocket for a few weeks and then get thrown out.
You can't beat those dayglo yellow starburst things for writing menu items on. I bought a pack from a catering shop once because I thought I could use them to lend a sense of urgency to my todo list. But I've not got around to todoing it yet.
Every cafe now seems to come with some copies of The Metro. It's one of the things I love about cafes, that sense of communal property, someone brings a paper, everyone gets to read it. It's like a socialist utopia. Well, not quite. But it's still a good thing.