eggbaconchipsandbeans

Full Monty Cafe, 207 Brighton Road (A23), Coulsdon

I've driven past this place countless times, but it's always just as you get out of the London/Croydon traffic and you feel like you're about to start motoring so it's a hard time to stop. But this time we stopped. And it was good.

Stopping instructions: 1. Look out for this sign.

2.  Order this. 3. Die happy. This really is a large and high quality ebcb. This a proper cafe, workers and drivers come in here. They want feeding proper food. Nothing is drizzled on anything. Everything flat is a slab, everything liquid is in a bucket, everything else is a pile. Marvelous. Look at those chips! Huge. Crunchy. Soft. Delicious.

And the condiments are comensurately huge. (Is that a word?) You could strap a command module on that sauce bottle and fly it to the moon.

The two canonical menu-types. The lettery-pin-board thing and the day-glo stars. I want all of these things. And look  - kippers! You don't see kippers often enough. I'd have had those if this blog had been called kippers.com. Perhaps it should be.

Someone's not going to manage his chips. No pudding for him then.

You could sit here all day, if there wasn't a job of work to be done. Brilliant place.

Jack's, 252 Lavender Hill, SW11

Jack's is a good response to the lazy cliche of cafes in decline. It's a successful, energetic business serving big old fry-ups to regular folk. They've upgraded fixtures and fitting, they've acknowledged the presence of modern tastes, they've got their own website, but they still do a quality ebcb.

Those chips look like they're swarming, a school of chips swimming around the bacon reef. I guess that would make the beans the sea or something. And the eggs would be the er, I don't know. The analogy collapses at that point. Suffice to say - delicious, the melty bits are properly melty, the crunchy bits deliver hefty crunch. Very good.

It's a clean, well-lighted place. (Is that almost a quote?) I'm as enthused as anyone by the down-at-heel, just-about-to-die vibe of some classic cafes but I also really like the bustle and life of a good, new cafe. There's nothing as human and social as a great little cafe, full of people and food and tea and shouting. Not that there's many people in this picture, it was very early. But you know what I mean.

I like that it's balanced somewhere between an American diner feel and a classic British one.

Good big mug. Lovely.