Order coffee in Nagoya before eleven and breakfast arrives with it

In Nagoya, the first coffee of the day is not sold on its own. Ask for a blend at a neighbourhood kissaten — kissaten (喫茶店), the old-style coffee house: dim, upholstered, usually run by one couple who have run it for thirty years — and somewhere between the order and the saucer, a thick slice of toast and a boiled egg arrive beside it. You did not ask for them. They are not on the bill.

What comes without being ordered

The convention is called mōningu (モーニング), morning service, and it generally runs from opening until around eleven. The standard set is toast cut thick, a foil-wrapped pat of butter, a hard-boiled egg still warm, sometimes a saucer of peanuts. What you pay is the price of the coffee, which in most independent rooms sits somewhere around 450 to 600 yen. Order the same cup at one in the afternoon and it costs the same and arrives alone.

Why Ichinomiya claims it

Twenty minutes north by train, Ichinomiya was a wool town, and the account the city gives is a practical one: the looms were too loud for anyone to negotiate over, so the cloth brokers moved their meetings to the cafés across the street, and the cafés fed them to keep them sitting. Ichinomiya still has one of the densest concentrations of kissaten in the country, and the sets there run heavier — a small salad, a triangle of sandwich, occasionally soup.

The coffee is what you pay for. The rest is the room deciding you should stay a while.

Ordering when the menu is one laminated card

Point and say burendo (ブレンド) and you have ordered correctly; nothing else is required. In Nagoya proper, look for ogura toast — toast under a spoonful of sweetened azuki bean paste, which argues with the butter and then wins. Two things worth checking at the door: some of these rooms still permit smoking, and the sign that says so is posted at the entrance by law; and many close on Sundays, because the customers they were built for do not work then.

モーニングは頼むものではなく、時間内に座れば付いてくるものだ。