Egg, bacon and a ghormeh sabzi: the UK’s greasy spoons are redoing their menus

Photograph: PR

Café De Melo, on Leyton High Road in east London, is much like any greasy spoon across the country. The menu spans the classics: English breakfast, bacon baps, eggs in all their variations. Regulars pop in for a coffee or chat to the waitress over beans on toast. At under £7, the full English is accessibly priced.

But a blackboard points to things you won’t find in a traditional English cafe – feijoada (black bean stew), vaca atolada (beef and cassava stew) and picanha (rump beef). They hint at the owner’s background. Brazilian-born Elizeu Cabral de Melo used to own a jewellery shop on the same site but two years ago put his lifelong love of cooking into practice. Yet he didn’t open a solely Brazilian restaurant, despite there being many Brazilian locals. “I didn’t want to be restricted to one type of clientele,” says Cabral de Melo. “A lot of my friends are English, so I wanted it to be Brazilian and English.”

This Anglo-Brazilian mash-up isn’t unique in London, with places such as Mineiro Café in Willesden offering similar choices. But it’s not just Brazilians combining their cuisine with traditional British fare. Turkish- and Kurdish-run spots abound in London. Arsenal Café in Finsbury Park serves gozleme, a stuffed Turkish flatbread, while at Joseph’s Café in Stoke Newington you can find menemen, a dish of scrambled eggs with peppers and tomatoes. Marie’s Café in Waterloo is one of the capital’s best-loved Thai restaurants, but in the morning it’s a cafe with a nod to its Thai kitchen with its deep-fried, crispy eggs.

There are Sri Lankan curries and bacon baps at Bank Street Café in Ashford, Kent. Moulin Rouge Café & Grill in Newcastle offers both Persian and English dishes, as does Metro Café in Chorlton, Manchester. Previously, it was a “very basic breakfast and sandwich bar”, according to owner Majid Novin, who took over in 2014. Keeping the English breakfast fare, he added halal breakfasts and Persian specialities such as ghormeh sabzi (a herby beef stew) and fesenjan (chicken with a pomegranate molasses and walnut sauce). “It wasn’t very popular at first, but it’s got busier as we go,” says Novin.

Greasy spoons or cafes serving cheap breakfast food have long been in decline, especially those with photos of footballers on the walls, plastic tabletops and hissing tea urns. In 2003, a book called Classic Cafés estimated that Britain had 500 left, down from around 2,000 in the 1950s. Isaac Rangaswami, the man behind the Instagram account @caffs_not_cafes, believes it’s now closer to 50.

Healthier eating habits and high street coffee chains have been accused of killing off the English breakfast. But peer into many unassuming immigrant-run cafes and a different picture emerges. The fry-up is putting up a fight.

Starting in the late 19th century, it was primarily Italians who created cafe culture. “It was a tempting industry to move into, with a lower barrier to entry,” says Rangaswami, who points to historic spots like E Pellicci in east London, which opened in 1900, University Café in Glasgow and Pino’s in Mountain Ash, Wales. Often they added versions of Italian food – chicken escalope, spaghetti bolognese, lasagne – to the menu, thereby helping introduce new dishes to Britain. It wasn’t only Italians. San’s Café in Liverpool has long served Chinese and British food; Hope Café on the Holloway Road in London does a mean moussaka.

Abdellah Aachoui has run Shrigley’s Moroccan Cuisine on London’s Bor­ough High Street with his wife, Amina, since 2008. Previously called simply Shrigley’s, the place has had Moroccan ­cuisine added to its name and menu. Moroccan chicken marinated in ­ginger, spinach, coriander and chilli is one of the most popular orders. There are traditional sandwiches – coronation chicken, egg mayo – and jacket potatoes (which can be filled with Moroccan chicken and hummus), but a separate menu offers chicken tagine and lamb couscous.

In 2012 Aachoui switched from a traditional fry-up to halal, meaning turkey bacon and beef sausages, and says the regulars, many health-conscious doctors and students from nearby King’s College London, largely adapted without complaint. It  has attracted more Muslim customers, too.

“It’s very hard to exclude British [food] from your menu,” says Aachoui. “We could easily get rid of all the sandwiches and concentrate on Moroccan, but it’s not fair on the customers.”

Guardian columnist Felicity Cloake, author of Red Sauce Brown Sauce: A British Breakfast Odyssey, points to Ecuadorian and Ethiopian examples near her house. “It feels like a two-way sharing of culinary cultures in a really nice way,” she says. When researching her book, Cloake found Polish-run greasy spoons in Lincolnshire serving pierogi dumplings.

The halal fry-up is “such a fascinating evolution”, Cloake adds. “What could be seen as summing us up as a nation, a lot of the population can’t eat. It has morphed into something more inclusive.” The correct makeup of an English breakfast is hotly contested, but Cloake believes “it’s not set in stone. It can evolve with the population.”

Cabral de Melo says Brazilians love his English breakfast and hopes to use the cafe as a springboard to introduce more Brazilian food, continuing a now centuries-old tradition. Britons have fallen in love with his chicken soup, while frango à passarinho (crispy fried chicken wings) served with pasta is a hit. “When they try it, my God, the English people love it,” he says. After all, it’s not dissimilar to the Italian-inspired caff favourite, chicken escalope with spaghetti.

That traditional greasy spoons are struggling is no secret. Over the past few years, countless longstanding examples have closed, including the Shepherdess in London and Station Café in Treorchy, Wales. Nevertheless, “there’s not a shortage of places on the high street where you can get a full English,” says Rangaswami.

For Cloake, “there’s been a slight fetishisation of the traditional caff. I understand why, but they’re not the only example of the spirit of the caff. It’s a place you can go and, for relatively little money, eat something and have a cup of tea, where usually ­everyone is accepted.”

As has happened for more than a century, foreign-born operators are keeping that tradition alive.