There is a moment, somewhere in the third week of September, when Devon exhales. The school-holiday traffic has gone home, the sea is as warm as it will be all year, and the light turns the colour of weak tea. Nobody is in a hurry any more — least of all us. This, we would argue, is the county's true brunch season. Not the elbow-to-elbow scramble of an August Saturday, but a long, unhurried morning with a second coffee and no particular plan, in a café where the staff have time to talk again.
Devon has never really needed the word "brunch". We have been eating enormous late breakfasts here for generations — farmhouse tables, harbourside greasy spoons elevated into institutions, bakeries older than most countries. But the word has caught up with the habit, and the county now does the long morning meal as well as anywhere in Britain. Here are six places we keep going back to, from a Dartmouth courtyard to a surf village in the north, with the tide of the morning in no rush at any of them.
Portofino, Wellswood, Torquay
Wellswood is the Torquay that visitors walk straight past on their way to the harbour: a leafy, villagey pocket up the hill towards Ilsham, with its own little parade of shops and a proper neighbourhood feel. Portofino opened on Ilsham Road in May 2023, run by siblings Howard, Ollie and Lydia as a celebration of their mother's Italian heritage, and it has settled in as the local morning fixture. Breakfast starts at half past nine, Tuesday to Sunday, and runs Italian — which in practice means you can begin the day with proper coffee and end it, if the morning stretches that way, with a scoop from their own ice cream counter. Lydia leads the room here while her brothers look after Ollie's and The Bit on the Side in town, and at weekends there is a bottomless brunch that turns a late breakfast into an occasion, with live music drifting through some evenings too. Afterwards, walk it off down the lane to Meadfoot Beach, one of Torbay's quietest corners now the season has turned. Portofino also happens to be the venue behind our latest drop, if you needed another reason to get acquainted.
Café Alf Resco, Dartmouth
Some cafés are institutions because they have been around a long time; Alf's is an institution because Dartmouth would riot without it. Peter and Kate Ryder opened Café Alf Resco on Lower Street on the first of April 1994, and more than thirty years later — with longtime manager Andy Green now at the helm — the formula is unchanged: doors open at 7am every day of the week, the open kitchen never deep-fries or microwaves anything, and the tables under the courtyard's flame-topped iron gates are shared between friends, families and strangers who become friends over a meal. The Guardian once put it among the fifty best breakfasts in the country, and the house marmalade has taken double gold at the International Marmalade Awards, which tells you how seriously the small things are taken. In winter a French parlour stove warms the room; in September you can still sit out and watch the river traffic idle past. Get there early — locals treat the 7am opening as a competitive sport.
The Exploding Bakery, Exeter
Tucked into the crescent of Central Station Buildings on Queen Street — you can be off a train and holding a coffee inside two minutes — the Exploding Bakery has been Exeter's morning treat since 2011, when school friends Tom and Oli set out to run a tiny bakery and café built around traybakes made with ground nut flours, butter and polenta. It started with twelve seats; in 2016 they knocked through into the shop next door, and the bakery still works away in full view behind the communal table. This is less a full-English sort of place than a cake-for-breakfast sort of place, a policy we wholeheartedly endorse: the traybakes have since filled two cookbooks, and the coffee is taken as seriously as the baking. Sit at the benches on the pavement, order something dense and buttery, and watch the city clock in while you don't.
Jacka Bakery, Plymouth
At 38 Southside Street on Plymouth's Barbican, a few doors along from the gin distillery, stands a shop that has been baking since the early sixteenth century and is often described as the oldest commercial bakery in Britain. Local tradition holds that Jacka provisioned the Pilgrims with ship's biscuit before the Mayflower sailed in 1620, and that Sir Francis Drake was a customer before them — stories worn smooth by four centuries of telling, and all the better for it. What is beyond dispute is what comes out of the ovens now: serious sourdough, pastries worth crossing the city for, and a morning queue of people who look like they know something you don't. Take the spoils fifty yards to the harbour wall and eat looking over the water the Mayflower actually left from. Few breakfasts anywhere come with this much history baked in.
Home Farm Café, Parke, Bovey Tracey
On the edge of Bovey Tracey, where the fields start tilting up towards the moor, the National Trust's Parke estate hides one of Dartmoor's best mornings. Home Farm Café serves brunch from ten until midday in the estate's old farm buildings, championing local suppliers and hanging local artists' work on the walls, and it has quietly become the meeting point for half the town — dogs, parkrunners and muddy walkers all welcome. The trick is to earn it first: Parke's riverside paths loop along the Bovey through the old walled garden and orchard, and an hour among the turning leaves makes the plate that follows taste considerably better. It is about a mile's walk out from the town centre, and in early autumn, with woodsmoke on the air and the moor going bronze above the trees, there are few finer places in Devon to be sitting at eleven in the morning.
Blue Groove, Croyde
North Devon does its mornings differently — earlier tides, sandier floors — and Blue Groove has been the heart of them in Croyde since 2001. It sits at Hobb's Hill in the middle of the village, a relaxed café-bar-restaurant where the breakfasts are built for people who have already been in the sea for two hours, and the rest of the menu wanders wherever the owner's travels have been: Thai one line, Mexican the next. In summer you will queue behind half of the beach; by late September it belongs to the locals again, and a slow breakfast on the terrace with salt still in your hair is one of the north coast's quiet pleasures. If you want the full contrast-therapy morning, the wood-fired saunas along the coast at Saunton feature in our guide to Devon's wild sauna boom — sea, steam, then eggs. In that order.
The long morning, done properly
What links these six, beyond the food, is a certain attitude to time. Nobody hovers for the table. The second coffee is assumed. September suits them all: the county's cafés get their character back when the crowds thin, and the sea stays swimmable well into October for anyone brave enough to earn their eggs the hard way — the tidal pools in our guide to Devon's lidos and sea pools are at their quiet best right now. Brunch, we have come to think, is less a meal than a truce with the clock. Devon, which has never been in much of a hurry, turns out to have been serving it all along.