I’m writing this in the Wolseley, on London’s famed and exotic Piccadilly. I’m writing it in honey. On porridge. They supply a very good all-purpose honey-writer for food critics.

Writing in sweetness is one of my earliest memories — and probably my first pleasure. It should be golden syrup. Do you remember what’s written on the Lyle’s syrup tin, underneath the picture of a dead lion with flies (not an immediately winning marketing image)? “Out of the strong came forth sweetness.” It’s from the Bible. The ancients believed that dead bodies magically spouted bees, who mystically created honey. How much nicer is ignorance than knowledge.

Porridge is the default setting of breakfast for me — I’m imprinted with porridge — and it must be the oldest concocted dish. Every country that grows a grain boils it with water. At the Wolseley, the sweet waitress told me, it’s made with water and finished with cream, then they serve it with a jug of milk and hard, dry, brown sugar. Why not make it correctly, with water, and just offer cream separately? This way, it’s too processed and smooth — and it has no salt. It isn’t actually porridge at all. It’s American oatmeal, a poor cousin to the braw chieftain o’ the breakfast race. But then nobody else’s porridge is ever going to be quite right. I swear that only pinhead oats are correct, not rolled. My children will eat my porridge, but they say it’s not proper, like their mother’s — which is fine, except I taught their mother how to make it.

I’m sitting here getting pedantic on porridge because my editor says that breakfast is back. It’s one of those emphatic, incisive pronouncements that editors make. She might have also said: “Breakfast is the new lunch.” I’m also sitting here on my own, because, when the alarm went and I said, “Quick, we’re due at the Wolseley in 20 minutes”, the Blonde rolled over and told me where to shove my full English.

Breakfast is the one meal where most of us will happily eat exactly the same thing all the days of our lives — and we whine and cavil if we don’t get it. What other people’s breakfasts could you eat from now on for ever? Chinese congee (filthy rice soup with bits of fish or pork)? Indian curried lentils? German cheese and salami? Scandinavian pickled fish? Jewish smoked fish and boiled bread? I didn’t think so. Breakfast is stubbornly resistant to multiculturalism.

The best foreign breakfast I’ve had is Vietnamese pho, a broth to which you add masses of aromatic herbs. What I could happily live without ever eating again is the English fry-up. This is a defining national characteristic. Englishmen abroad grow tearful remembering it and get into fights defending it. All that pig on a plate, the insole bacon and thick-skinned sausages, the slimy mushrooms and scrotal tomatoes, the fried bread and claggy beans — it’s the inedible evocation of Blighty, full of fat, blood and wind. It’s sentimental cultural cannibalism.

Whatever your idea of breakfast, it is best eaten in silence, in your own kitchen. There’s something insufferably, perkily Doris Day about doing it in public. It used to be that, to get breakfast, you’d have to go to a cafe — which are now almost extinct — or a big hotel, where you’d consume something nasty and congealed from a buffet in the company of jet-lagged German detergent salesmen and coveys of Japanese in weird holiday outfits.

But it seems that a lot of central London restaurants are starting to offer breakfast — from Galvin at Windows to Automat, in Mayfair. It isn’t so much that breakfast is the new lunch; it’s that all meals are the new breakfast. As Somerset Maugham said: “If you want to eat well in England, you have to eat breakfast three times a day.” At Canteen, in Spitalfields, you can order breakfast for dinner. Raoul’s, in Notting Hill, has an all-day breakfast menu that isn’t quite caff, but isn’t quite restaurant, either.

It’s this third way of taking your sausage that the Wolseley has either invented or exploited so successfully. The room is airy and pleasant, and doesn’t smell of frying or cabbage and cod carpet. The menu is comprehensive and generally well made. Apart from the porridge, I had a fruit salad that was a salad made from fruit — most of which was seasonably exotic — and a croissant, a bun that’s terribly sinned against, principally by being called French, when in fact it’s Austrian. This one was properly chewy in the middle and flaky on the outside, and unadulterated by almonds, cheese, scrambled egg and bacon, sausage meat or chicken tikka. With coffee and water, my bill was £20.

The place was fullish — a mixture of business people, bottom-sniffing and willy-measuring, a couple of bright and early tourists, and a smug smatter of grinning first-time couples in their night-before clothes, showing off their post-coital glows. I watched a table of half a dozen young professionals listen to their elderly boss, who didn’t draw breath or crack a smile for an hour. They ate like nervous cats, and all wore identical charcoal suits and expressions of stoically born despair.

After 100 years of repeating the same thing over and over, the business suit has inverted its meaning. It now looks like the motley of second-rateness and drudgery, the overalls of repetitive clerking, collating and flunkiness. A suit doesn’t make you authoritative or smart. It makes you an unimaginative proto-failure. Behind the suits sat Jimmy Mulville, founder of the production company Hat Trick and one of the most successful men in television, wearing a holiday shirt and plimsolls. He looked the business. If you ask any bright graduate whom they’d rather work for, the bore in the whistle or the bloke without socks, they’d all choose Jimmy.

Selling breakfast as the new lunch will be a good thing for West End restaurants. Dining rooms spend most of their days empty, and it would be nice if London became a city that enjoyed a hospitable, civilised moment at the beginning of the day, and took back that worst of all breakfasts: a cardboard cup full of sticky froth and a soggy, noxious muffin snatched from Starbucks and slurped over the slurry of morning e-mails.

I’ve decided I want my epitaph to read: “Here lies a man whose name was writ in honey. On porridge.”

THE WOLSELEY

160 Piccadilly, W1; 020 7499 6996
Monday-Friday, 7am-midnight, Saturday, 9am-midnight, Sunday, 9am-11pm

5 stars Full monty
4 stars Toast of the town
3 stars Bean better
2 stars Not a sausage
1 star Cereal killer

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