Sixteen places we would actually get up for, from a £7.60 egg and chilli cheese roll in a Dalston car park to a £26.50 full English in Mayfair, with what each one actually costs.
Breakfast is the meal London does best, and it is the one most guides get laziest about. The city will sell you a £19 plate of avocado on sourdough with very little argument. It will also, if you know where to stand, sell you a fry-up cooked by a family who have been doing it on the same corner since 1900.
So this is both: the classic caffs and the proper full English first, because that is what most people are actually looking for, then the grand hotel breakfasts, the bakeries, and the places doing breakfast from somewhere other than Britain. Every price below came off the venue’s own menu unless we have said otherwise, and we have said otherwise where we could not stand behind a number.
If you would rather stay in one postcode, we have separate guides to breakfast and brunch in Soho, Covent Garden, Marylebone, Notting Hill, Shoreditch, Stoke Newington, Brixton, Chelsea and Fulham. If you want it bottomless, that is a different guide again.
Hampstead has its own breakfast cluster down Perrin’s Court, covered in our guide to restaurants in Hampstead.
A proper full English
The full English is not a single dish so much as an argument about proportions, and these four have each settled it in their own way. What they have in common is that none of them is trying to reinvent it.
Terry’s Café
156-158 Great Suffolk Street, SE1 1PE · 7.30am to 3pm daily, kitchen closes 2.30pm
Terry opened this in 1982, having been a butcher at Smithfield, and the meat still comes from the market, which is the whole reason the sausages taste like sausages. It started as somewhere for builders to eat before a shift and it has kept the look, the Formica and the framed photographs and the union jack bunting, without it curdling into theme-pub nostalgia.
The fry-ups are named and priced properly: the Standard is £15.50, the Works £18.50, the Blowout and the Hamlet £16.50 each, and there are veggie and vegan versions at £15.50. If you want the full silly version there is a Champagne Breakfast at £40 a head, which gets you the fry-up, sourdough and preserves, juice, tea and a mini Moët. Book through OpenTable if you are coming at the weekend. The thing to know is that the kitchen stops at 2.30pm and the door stays open until three, so a late arrival gets tea and a sit down and nothing else. More around the corner in our guide to Borough Market.
Regency Café
17-19 Regency Street, SW1P 4BY · closed Sundays
The most photographed caff in London, and for a while it looked as though the photographs were all that would be left of it. The black-tiled art deco frontage went dark in 2024 when the Perotti and Schiavetta families sold up after decades behind the counter, and it stayed shut for about eighteen months. It reopened on 22 July 2025 under new owners, Fevzi and Zafer Gungor, with Westminster having extracted commitments that the traditional offering would survive.
It has. The cooked breakfast is still the point, the shouted order is still the system, and the menu still runs through lasagne, omelettes, liver and bubble and squeak alongside it, with eggs Benedict and hash browns added since the handover. The timings are the trap. It opens 7am to 2.30pm on weekdays, shuts for the afternoon, then reopens 4pm to 7.15pm, closes at noon on Saturday and does not open on Sunday at all. Turn up at three and you get a locked door.
E Pellicci
332 Bethnal Green Road, E2 0AG · 8am to 3pm, closed Sundays
Trading since 1900, run by the same family throughout, and Grade II listed for the 1946 marquetry interior, which is the only caff in London with a listing for its panelling. The room seats about thirty at a squeeze and you will share a table, which is not a hardship because the conversation is half of what you came for.
The menu is Italian and English in roughly equal measure, so you can have a Cumberland sausage fry-up with fried bread or a plate of lasagne, and the coffee is properly Italian rather than an afterthought. Worth knowing before you plan around it: published prices for the fry-up vary wildly between sources and the café’s own menu page is down, so we are not going to print a figure we cannot stand behind. It is closed all day Sunday and shuts at three. More in the area in our Hackney café guide.
Maria’s Market Café, Borough Market
9 Stoney Street, SE1 9AA · 7am to 3pm daily
Maria Moruzzi’s parents opened the Borough Cafe on Park Street in 1961 and the family has been feeding market traders ever since, which makes this the oldest continuously running breakfast in the market by a wide margin. The bubble and squeak is the famous thing, the sausage in a floury bap is the practical thing, and the tea is the colour of a creosoted fence.
The single best piece of information about it is that it is open seven days a week, 7am to 3pm, which almost nothing else in the market manages. If you do not want to wait for a table you can ring ahead on 07592 199 908 and collect. Come before the produce stalls open and you get the market at its best, which is traders shouting at each other across empty aisles. Our full guide to eating at Borough Market covers the rest of the day.
Breakfast worth dressing for
The other end entirely, where breakfast is a booking rather than a decision and the fry-up costs what a main course used to. The compensation is that these are three of the best rooms in London and they are at their emptiest before ten.
The Wolseley Piccadilly
160 Piccadilly, W1J 9EB · from 7am weekdays, 8am weekends
Still the best room in London to eat breakfast in, and still, remarkably, a place you can usually walk into. The English is £24.50 and comes with black pudding as standard, which is the correct decision. Around it sits the most interesting breakfast menu in the city for anyone bored of eggs: kedgeree at £25.50, fried haggis with duck eggs and whisky sauce at £19.50, devilled lamb kidneys at £18.50, a grilled kipper at £16.75.
If you are economising, the porridge is £10.50 and you are still sitting under the same vaulted ceiling. Eggs Benedict runs £13.95 or £21.50 depending on size. The rule that catches people is that hot items stop at 11.30am, so a leisurely 11.15 arrival is a viennoiserie arrival. Book if you can, but the walk-in odds here are better than anywhere else at this level.
Mount St. Restaurant
41-43 Mount Street, W1K 2RX, first floor · 7.30am to 10.30am weekdays, 9am to 10.45am weekends
The best-value serious fry-up in London, which is not a sentence anybody expects to write about Mayfair. The Full English is £26.50 and the kitchen describes it as a traditional, albeit updated, London classic, which in practice means everything on the plate is very good rather than reinvented.
The rest of the list is where it gets properly tempting: a bacon chop with bubble and squeak and a fried duck egg at £26, Omelette Arnold Bennett at £22.50, kedgeree at £22.50, smoked trout and scrambled egg at £22.50, and an Oscietra caviar omelette at £48 for anyone having a particular sort of morning. It takes no cash at all and adds 15 per cent discretionary service. Non-residents are welcome, which is worth saying out loud because most rooms of this quality are not. More nearby in our Mayfair café guide.
Duck & Waffle
Heron Tower, 110 Bishopsgate, EC2N 4AY, 40th floor · open 24 hours
Forty floors up, open around the clock, and the only restaurant on this list where you can have breakfast at four in the morning and nobody will ask why. Breakfast service proper runs 6am to 10.30am on weekdays and 6am to 10am at weekends, but the kitchen never actually stops.
The signature is the duck and waffle itself at £26, a confit Gressingham duck leg on a waffle with a fried duck egg and mustard maple syrup, which sounds like a dare and works. The English Breakfast is £19.50 and the crème brûlée French toast the same. Book online, up to two months ahead, and go for a window table at sunrise rather than sunset, when it is a third as busy for the same view. Two small print items: it takes no cash whatsoever, and there is a £7 per person charge if you bring your own cake.
Bakeries and counters
Where breakfast is something you eat standing up, or at a counter, or on a wall outside. It is also where the best value on the page lives, by a distance none of the restaurants get close to.
St John Neal’s Yard Wine Bar
6 Neal’s Yard, WC2H 9DP · breakfast 9am to 11.45am daily
The most significant breakfast opening in London in years, and it happened quietly in July 2026. St John had not served breakfast anywhere since 2020; the bakery and wine bar it opened in Neal’s Yard in October 2025 now does, every morning, from nine until a quarter to twelve.
What that means in practice is the bacon bun, which is the dish St John built a reputation on, alongside a bacon and smoked cod’s roe version and an anchovy bun for anybody who wants to start the day properly. There are doughnuts and pastries, and there are breakfast cocktails, and the house suggestion is a glass of perry with the bacon bun at half nine in the morning, which tells you everything about the institution’s priorities. Neal’s Yard itself is covered in our guide to the courtyard and what else is in it.
The Dusty Knuckle
Abbot Street Carpark, E8 3DP · 8am to 3.30pm daily, breakfast 9am to 11am weekdays and all day at weekends
The best value breakfast in London, in a car park in Dalston, from a bakery that started as a social enterprise training young people who had been through the criminal justice system. The egg and chilli cheese on focaccia is £7.60, or £9.80 if you add bacon. A bacon sarnie on sourdough is £8.50, plus £1.50 for an egg. Granola with yoghurt, fruit and compote is £6.50 and toast with spreads is £3.60.
Nothing else on this page comes close on price, and the bread is better than places charging three times as much. The catch is the window: breakfast runs 9am to 11am on weekdays and that is it, though it is served all day on Saturday and Sunday. If you want a loaf or pastries to take away at the weekend, the pre-orders close at midnight on Friday.
Toad Bakery, Deptford
Restaurant 1, St Paul’s House, 3 Market Yard, SE8 4BX · 7.30am to 3.30pm weekdays, 8am to 4pm Saturday, 9am to 3pm Sunday
Toad opened in Camberwell in 2022 and became the bakery other bakers talked about. In July 2026 it moved all its bread production to a much bigger site in Deptford Market Yard and opened the room to the public, with the kitchen visible along a chestnut counter.
The everything croissant is the signature, the soy sauce chocolate chip cookies are the thing you did not know you wanted, and the pricing is the part that matters: filter coffee under £3, bread rolls from 80p, an iced brioche at £2.50. That is a proper breakfast for under a fiver in 2026, from one of the best bakeries in the city. It opens at 7.30am on weekdays, which makes it a genuine commuter option rather than a weekend treat. More around it in our guide to Deptford.
Bread Ahead and Monmouth, Borough Market
Bread Ahead: Cathedral Street, 9am to 5pm Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm Sunday · Monmouth: 2 Park Street, SE1 9AB, 7.30am to 6pm Monday to Saturday
The two counters that make a Borough breakfast worth crossing town for, and the two that catch people out on the wrong day. Bread Ahead does the doughnuts, the filled croissants and the sourdough, and runs a baking school on site if you want to make your own. Monmouth has been roasting since 1978 and still does one single-cone filter and one espresso rather than a menu of origins.
Here is the scheduling problem. Bread Ahead is closed all day Monday. Monmouth is closed all day Sunday. Maria’s, three minutes away, is the only one open every day. Monmouth also does not stock single-use cups at all, so bring your own or drink it standing there, which is what everybody in the queue is doing anyway.
Breakfast from somewhere else
The category London does better than anywhere else, and the reason the full English is not actually the best breakfast in the city. Between them these three cover Bombay, Osaka and the Aegean before nine in the morning.
Dishoom
Eight London sites · breakfast 8am to 11.45am weekdays, 9am to 11.45am weekends
The bacon naan roll is the most ordered breakfast dish in London and it has earned it. Currently £13.50, or £13.90 for the double bacon, and the egg version is £10.70. Around it sits the whole Bombay café menu: akuri, the spiced scrambled eggs, at £12.50; chole puri halwa at £15.90; the Big Bombay at £17.70; keema per eedu at £17.90.
There are eight sites now, in Battersea, Borough, Canary Wharf, Carnaby, Covent Garden, Kensington, King’s Cross and Shoreditch, and King’s Cross remains the best room of them. The one rule worth tattooing somewhere: breakfast stops at 11.45am, weekends included, and they do not bend on it. Prices vary very slightly between sites, so the group menu is a guide rather than a guarantee.
Koya Soho
50 Frith Street, W1D 4SQ · from 10am, walk-ins only
The Japanese breakfast that made Londoners understand why you would eat fish and rice in the morning. The Full Japanese Breakfast Set is £21.90 and gets you grilled fish, egg, bonito on rice and miso soup; the smaller Japanese Breakfast is £16.90. The udon is the other reason to be here, and the Kitsune at £15.50 and Kinoko at £16.70 are both breakfast-appropriate if you want noodles at eleven in the morning, which you should.
One important recalibration if you have an old guide in your head: Koya does not open until 10am, so this is a late breakfast or an early lunch rather than a dawn option. It takes no bookings at all, so you queue on Frith Street, and the queue at 10am on a Saturday is shorter than the queue at one. More on the street in our guide to breakfast and brunch in Soho.
Leydi
Hyde London City, 15 Old Bailey, EC4M 7EF · 7am to 11am Monday to Saturday, 7am to 3pm Sunday
Selin Kiazim, formerly of Oklava, opened this inside the Hyde hotel in September 2024 and it is the answer to the question of where to get a proper Turkish breakfast in central London. The full spread arrives as a table of small plates rather than a single dish, and Sunday is the day to do it, because service runs until three rather than eleven.
The detail worth knowing is the hatch. Leydi in the Window opens onto the street from 7.30am to 3pm on weekdays and sells house-made börek and barista coffee without you having to go into the restaurant at all, which makes it one of the best things you can eat near St Paul’s for under a tenner. Restaurant bookings go through SevenRooms. Breakfast prices are published as a PDF only, so check before you commit a table of four.
The all-day crowd
The reliable middle, where you can turn up at eleven without a plan and still eat well. Neither of these needs an alarm, which is the whole point of them.
The Black Penny
34 Great Queen Street WC2B 5AA, 55 Duke of York Square SW3 4LY, 17 Casson Square SE1 7BQ
Three sites now, and the reason to know about it is that brunch runs all day, so an eleven-thirty start is not a problem and a two o’clock start is not either. The Hunter, which is the house fry-up with eggs, sausage, bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms, is £18.90; the bubble and squeak is £16.90; the salt beef hash and the crispy duck hash are £19.90 each; and the smashed avocado, at £11.90, is one of the few in central London that has not drifted past fifteen pounds.
Weekdays they hold walk-in tables, weekends you want a booking, which can be made up to a day ahead. One rule that trips people up: they will not seat a party until everybody has arrived, so do not send one person ahead to hold the table. More in the area in our guide to breakfast and brunch in Covent Garden.
The Breakfast Club
Ten London sites
Twenty years of American diner breakfasts and still the one people name first when you ask. The Brekky menu, the pancake stacks, the benedicts, the breakfast burritos: none of it has changed much and none of it needs to. Get there early, because the queues are the defining feature and they are longest between ten and noon at weekends.
The genuinely useful thing to know is about the addresses. There are ten London sites and three of them are in Soho, on Old Compton Street, Berwick Street and D’Arblay Street, within a few minutes of each other. Arranging to meet somebody at the Soho branch is therefore a good way to lose them for half an hour. The others are in Angel, Hackney Wick, Hoxton, London Bridge, Seven Dials, Spitalfields and St Pancras International.
The London x London Take: Two names cover most situations. For a proper full English, Terry’s Café, because the meat comes from Smithfield and the Standard at £15.50 is the right size rather than a challenge. For everything else, the bacon bun and a glass of perry at St John in Neal’s Yard, which is the most quietly significant breakfast to open in London in years. If you are paying, Mount St. does a £26.50 full English that is better than fry-ups costing the same in hotels twice as grand. If you are not, the Dusty Knuckle will feed you properly for £7.60, and the bread is better.
