Seabreeze, East Cowes

Ahh, the eternal quest for a poached egg once the sun is over the yard-arm. Sun? For those eyeing interminable grey skies in this washed out summer, that’s anywhen after 11am.

The concept of an all-day breakfast appeals greatly to us because we often fall foul of the mid-morning cut-off prevalent in a lot of cafes. Look, we get up too late, ok, and don’t want to start our day with sandwiches and cake. So having snubbed our noses at another cafe’s eggless lunch menu, we found ourselves in Seabreeze.

This corner cafe is quite the East Cowes landmark. We’ve visited it many times over the years; sometimes when waiting for a ferry, or as a precursor to a trip over the Medina to the giddy lights of ‘West’ Cowes. Whatever the purpose of our visit, Seabreeze was happy for us to shell out for post-noon eggs, so that’s exactly what we did.

There were a few optimistic pavement tables, but the English summer thwarted any desire to eat outside in the drizzle, so we sat in. Seabreeze is a popular place, yet almost seems underplayed. Do its spacious interior and double aspect have the potential to be home to a ‘proper’ restaurant? Perhaps there isn’t a market in the town for more evening dining. Certainly there were enough people having lunch there while we waited for our breakfasts.

The poached eggs arrived with two rounds of toasted white bread (no brown alternative was offered). Interestingly, although both eggs were cooked in the traditional way by dropping them directly into boiling water, and presumably at the same time, one yolk was almost solid and the other runny. The meal was simple yet met the standard for poached egg on toast – which was what we’d been after.

With warnings about the heat of the plate, the mushroom omelette arrived. We had the breakfast option, which came with beans; we could’ve pimped up our order to the lunch variation, with dressed salad and steak-cut chips. The omelette was more like a frittata, with plenty of quartered and fried mushrooms covered and cooked in beaten egg rather than folded within, but that’s a technicality. It was hot and filling, and benefitted from a sprinkle of salt and pepper. As we watched the spread on the single round of toast slowly melting under the heat of the plate we tucked into the beans, which added their welcome tomatoey flavour to the meal.

Seabreeze is your standard town centre cafe serving a reasonable selection of hot meals, all-day breakfasts, plus afternoon pizzas. We liked the friendly service, unpretentious atmosphere and the pleasingly decent coffee.

This is the full-length version of a review that was printed in the Isle of Wight County Press.

28 York Avenue, East Cowes PO32 6RU