Let's put on our classics and have a little dance, shall we...

Stealth has moved (part-time) to Margate. The last time we were both here together was over two decades ago, when I was at uni up the road and Stealth came to visit. We were somehow organised enough to join my house mates on a trip to the sea that involved bleak concrete, gale force winds and a hangover.

This time only the latter was accurate. And although Arlington House still dominates the skyline the shopping centre at the foot of the tower has been razed to the ground and the whole town has a pep in its step, buoyed by the Turner Gallery, the growing art scene and the DFLs (down from Londons) who have streamed to the coast, attracted by the East Kent property prices, bracing sea air and neighbours who want to stop and chat to you (I'm not sure this was a plus point, in Stealth's case).

We enjoyed a lovely few days with Stealth and Regina, the perfect hosts, that included delicious scallops and picpoul de pinet at Hantverk and Found; confit duck nuggets and chocolate orange martinis at the Cinq Ports; and Stealth's (homemade) lamb curry with (not homemade) peshwari naan All washed down with Aldi champagne, Stealth's new favourite tipple. Austerity has finally hit the City.

As I'm predicting a surfeit of Thanet-related posts (I sense another micropub crawl by the sea in my near future) coming up on the blog over the next few months, I'm going to kick things off with (re)visits to a few old school Kentish classics.

First up was the Dalby Cafe, a stalwart that has been on the corner of Dalby Square in Cliftonville since just after the Second World war, still with the original formica tables and seats reclaimed from the old Margate trams that trundled along the seafront.

Coincidentally seen in an article featuring a rather wan Pete Doherty (excitingly now residing in Stealth's very neighbourhood) taking down their super-sized breakfast a few weeks before our visit. While I wasn't sure I could take down a plate that included four sausages, four rashers, bubble and squeak, hash browns, toast and a burger and chips (I'm pretty sure the Ewing could), I was looking forward to something slightly more modest, if no less delicious.

The menu focuses on their all day breakfast, but also offers stalwarts such as braised steak, cottage pie, scampi, corned beef and a good-looking plate of fish and chips, which the chaps on the table next to me were enthusiastically slathering in salad cream and tucking in to at half ten in the morning.

The Ewing, not known for her great memory, managed to get to the counter and accurately reel off the list of things I had requested (plus the same, with an egg, for her) to be told; 'that sounds like a medium'. Six quid. Including toast and a proper mug of strong builder's tea. Cracking value. 

The reward for her excellent recollection was a proper tasty plate of piping hot food featuring quality bacon and snags - while I'm a sucker for a tube of meat paste, this one had herbs in so you could tell it was fancy - plus two big discs of black pud, excellent fried mushrooms and both baked beans and tinned toms for lubrication. Proper butter on the toast also got both thumbs up from my wife.

Monday morning saw us left to our own devices. So, after my enormously patient wife had driven through a bog, reversed all the way up an endless single track road and then back down another 'road' in pursuit of the Ham Sandwich finger post (worth every swear word and sweaty palm) we retreated to Morelli's in Broadstairs for a well needed fillip.

Opened in 1932, the interior of the original Morelli's - there is now a concession in Harrods, stores in Covent Garden and Portabello Road and franchises in the Middle East - has remained resolutely faithful to the past with its art deco interior, complete with ornate ceiling, sugar pink leather banquettes, Lloyd Loom rattan chairs, formica topped tables and a classic soda fountain. (and the ice cream cone shaped brass lamps - TE).

They offer a variety of different sundaes and coupes, but the Ewing kept it simple with a trio of pistachio, hazelnut and coffee gelatos. Despite my sugar moratorium I may have tried a couple of spoonfuls of both the nutty ones, and I was very glad I did. The pistachio in particular was utterly exceptional.

Alongside was a decent dry double macchiato for me and a, slightly odd, DIY bicerin for the Ewing, with separate glasses of cream and chocolate sauce to mix in with her coffee. While paling in comparison to the peerless version at Soho's Bar Torino, she still appreciated the surfeit chocolate coffee beans that accompanied it.

I can remember coming to Margate on the train with an ex, as penniless students for a romantic day by the sea. Obviously it was cold and grey with buffeting winds (as all my memories of Margate were) but, being Brits, we decided fish and chips by the beach was the order of the day.

We chose Peter's Fish Factory as not only was it near the harbour, but was offering a deal on 'saithe' and chips. Neither of us had any idea what this mystery fish was (prosaically, it later turned out to be pollock), but it was cheap and sounded exotic and tasted extra good with the smell of sea air in our nostrils, despite the added sand in every other bite. 

This time Peter's had a deal offering the more familiar haddock and chips for £4.50, and the Ewing was dispatched to fetch them while I dashed across the road to take some pictures of Dreamland and the mighty Arlington House in the afternoon sunshine.

I've eaten some very average fish and chips recently, but these were absolutely top-tier. Skin on (we are in the south) haddock with a thin carapace of peerless batter with a scoop of properly cooked chips - nicely golden with a fluffy inner. All seasoned with lashings of salt and vinegar and accompanied by the biggest pickled wally I'd seen since I looked in the mirror that morning. Oh, and a Diet Coke to wash it down. Got to think of the diet.

This was the view while eating lunch - the blue plaque you can see in the corner commemorates TS Eliot 'who wrote part of the poem the Wasteland whilst sitting in the Nayland Rock Shelter'. Although why the plaque wasn't affixed to the shelter where we sat, instead of being attached to the public loo next door, remains a mystery. 

I'll leave you with two photos of Stealth and I, taken on Margate beach 20 years apart. How they let us out like that, I'm not sure (escapees - TE). Although things haven't improved all that much. On Margate sands. I can connect. Nothing with nothing, as Thomas Stearns said himself.

Breakfast at Browns

I've eaten a fair few fry-ups recently, which is slightly unfortunate as I'm going to California in a couple of weeks and far from being beach body ready, I'm more in danger of being harpooned if I get too close to the shoreline.

Still, where's the fun in porridge? Especially if you're in the City of Dreaming Spires for the weekend and you've got the opportunity to go to Brown's Cafe for a proper breakfast.

Inside is old old school fomica and closely packed wooden tables and chairs, pretty much how it's always been; in fact a recent episode of Endeavour - the pre-Morse Morse, set in the 60s - featured scenes that were shot here and pretty much the only thing they had to change were the menu boards.

Speaking of the menu, of course it had to be the May Day breakfast - named for the annual Oxonian celebrations that start on nearby Magdalen Bridge - twice, once with beans and fried bread for me and once with grilled tomato and toast for the Ewing.

Tea is still made in an urn, with loose tea leaves and is the colour of Frank Butcher when attempted to woo Pat in his rotating bow tie (and little else) and strong enough to stand your spoon up in. Proper stuff.

One handy thing about being an ouef-avoider is there’s always scope for swapsies, in this case half a grilled tomato for my egg, a deal I was more than happy with, although I also got hit up for a spoonful of my beans. The other constituent parts were all present and correct – comfortingly paste-like sausage, two rashers of thick unsmoked back bacon, a scattering of token mushrooms and a couple of discs of black pudding that weren’t quite as crisp as I would have liked, but I like them to be fried until they are black on black.

Toast, slightly irritatingly, comes perched on top of your breakfast, which saves on washing up but makes it much harder to construct a cheeky bacon sarnie on the side. Again, in the spirit of sharing, we went 50/50 on our sliced carbs – half toast and half fried slice.

Reader, I can tell you it was a revelation. Whilst a good fried slice remains a god amongst mere men as part of a breakfast, anyone who has ever eaten a whole slice, or heaven forfend, two, at breakfast time will probably tell you there day all went downhill from there. The first, crisp triangle, anointed with a few sweet beans and a slash of spicy brown sauce, slips down easily enough, but soon it becomes an greasy trudge to the finish line followed by a packet of Rennies for lunch.

If chops, chips and cups of creosote coloured tea aren't your thing, then the Portuguese heritage of the owners mean you can also get a bolo de arroz- a kind of Portuguese muffin made of rice flour and wrapped in a distinctive skirt of lettered paper - or the perennial favourite, the pasteis de nata, or custard tart.

After just half a fried slice even the Ewing couldn't manage one of these crisp and flaky beauties, with their wobbly centres and burnished tops, but they were still fine a couple of days later, accompanied by a pot of strong coffee.

While I'm looking forward to a couple of weeks of In-N-Out burgers, Dodger Dogs, french dip sandwiches and avocado on everything nothing beats a good British fried breakfast; I just hope I can still get in my shorts.

Shepherdess Cafe

As Donne famously said, 'no man is an island', something that can be extended to most things in this tangled web of a word we're passing through, but when you look at the Shepherdess Cafe, just of the Old Street Roundabout, it's hard not to think of it adrift both architecturally and culturally. A piece of living history, that endures as everything changes around it.

Of course, old isn't always good. There's no point clinging onto the past if it's no longer fit for purpose. I mean, I sometimes get nostalgic about those little pots of pre-grated Parmesan, that smelt like sick yet seemed such a revelation in the late 80's, but I don't want to sprinkle them on my pasta anymore.

Thankfully the Shepherdess is reassuringly nostalgic, while still having a place in the modern world. There's a big all day breakfast menu - the builder's being the most popular, on our first visit we were the only ones not wearing hi-vis for most of it - but also porridge and poached eggs and even a 'Nick the Greek brekkie', with grilled halloumi, olives and chopped salad.

Lunchtime sees comforting classics like pies with peas, liver and bacon, scampi, chops, salads (the tinned sardine option is pleasingly retro, if pretty unappetising) and jacket spuds. And a huge choice of sandwich fillings can be ordered on breads ranging from baps to bagels, brown sliced to baguettes. 

Just. Look. At. That. Thick cut bacon, grilled tomato, perfect cheap sausage with it's burnished coat reassuringly paste-like middle; excellent mushrooms (mushrooms seem very tricky to get right) and a chip breakwater stopping the baked beans from escaping (imperative - TE).

While bubble and squeak is my favourite potato application to accompany breakfast, I'm really quite into any kind of fried potato tin the morning, even the controversial chip. Not least because I know it upsets the magical Stealth, and so I always ensure I send her a photo. It's actually almost impossible to avoid a chip here as most plates feature a couple, even if they are not requested, as a kind of garnish.

I asked for a couple of slices of bread alongside, so I could make a cheeky chip butty.  Soft white sliced and hot salty chips melting into the the butter, another clear advantage of having fried spuds on the plate.

I'm not sure that a bagel with three poached eggs, no skimping here, hollandaise and smoked salmon (plus half a dozen chips) is the best option on a raging hangover; but what do I know? (yeah, yeah, no one likes a smugkins - TE).

Quite a lot, as it happens, as I watched the Ewing valiantly attempt her breakfast after the shenanigans of the previous night - involving much red wine at The Z in Shoreditch and ending up with her carrying a cup of hot chocolate across the hotel room and into bed in a manoeuvre that would have made Mrs Overall proud. She wasn't enamoured with the packet sauce, but I think too much sauce the evening before had as much to do with that... 

In my old age I think I'm becoming a less is more kinda girl (although I'm still not into vanilla ice cream or ready salted crisps), and on my most recent visit I went with a classic cabbie combo, but with #noegg and extra mushrooms. Plenty of salt and vinegar on the  steaming hot chips and two rounds of toast, for a toasted bacon sarnie, on the side. As close to an early morning state of transcendence as I'm ever going to get.

When the waitress asked Ewing 'chips or salad?' there was a half second pause, to which she quickly interjected before my wife could reply; 'chips!' Of course it had to be chips, especially when they are freshly cooked, crisp and fluffy like these.

To go with her chips she ordered a cheese and mushroom omelette, a childhood favourite her mum used to make for her. Despite my enduring egg hatred I've kind of got a feeling I'd quite like an omelette if I could get over my distrust. I valiantly tried a mouthful of this, and while it was about fifty per cent cheese, it was really rather good.

While a crazy array of Inception-esque buildings continue to shoot up around it, and you can eat your way around the globe in the restaurants nearby - from Mexican to Scandinavian, to ramen - the Shepherdess remains as a wonderfully isolated, but never alone, example of old school London.