Sue’s Breakfast Bar

Yes Sue’s serve up breakfast grub to students and tradesmen alike and yes it has a nostalgic effect on all the half sober lot that make it into the chairs, grateful for the food to quench their gut. Rightly so this is a café straight out of Eastenders but more interestingly it’s well kept with pride on the walls in support of the owners football team more interestingly it has kept the traditional greasy spoon alive on a road that had forsaken such a place.
Am I making this place out to be great, well yes and no. Sue’s has it’s place and that is filling people with warm comfort food for a hard days work.

Sue’s Breakfast Bar holds a special place in my heart; it’s a café that harkens back to a simpler time. A time when men and women got up at 5am and seemed to leave for work already covered in soot. When fat men sat down for lunch at 10am, slopping runny eggs into their mouths whilst slurping down oceans of sweet tea. A time that Eastenders seems to have been stuck in since the 1980s.
It’s a proper greasy spoon café, is what I’m saying. Sure, the men are slightly cleaner when they enter, and the food isn’t held together by an adhesive made out of 93% pure week-​old chip fat, and there’s a far higher proportion of students cramming stodge in their bleary-​eyed faces at 11am, but it still has that feeling. And I’m glad. These are cafes that I grew up with; they were my grandfather’s restaurant of choice and, when I went with my dad in his big van, it’s where we inevitably got our grub from. To the generation that follows me, it won’t mean much if these disappear, but to me there’s a nostalgia that comes with them.
And the food’s not as bad as it sounds, either. Bacon never tastes as good as when it’s served here.

Sue’s Breakfast Bar is innocuous enough in itself, but to my mind it’s essential to the fabric of City Road in some unfathomable way. It’s hard to pinpoint it’s importance, or at least the importance I attribute to it… I guess it must be a sum of all its parts rather than one thing in particular… or something like that? Put it this way, if it ceased to be there, the place just wouldn’t be the same… there would be something missing, something small, but nevertheless significant.
Is it the true blue support that the café invests in Bristol City, with memorabilia adorning the walls? Or is it that it harkens back to yesteryear, when things were simpler, and just that little bit more ‘cosy’? Or is it that Sue’s Breakfast Bar is practically the only eatery left on the street that seems to celebrate the morning as it begins, instead of something that happens at the drunken tail-​end of a night out? Or is it the simple comfort food made with care that warms the cockles of my heart? And the prices? The prices that also seem to have weathered the vicissitudes of time? Yes, it’s a combination of all of these things. That and the chicken and stuffing dinner for £4.00 followed by cherry pie and custard.