Organic Deli Cafe, Friars Entry (breakfast)

I’m not sure how interesting an ‘Oxford Review of Breakfasts’ would be: most of the time one cafe’s £5 fry-up looks very much like another’s. But there are a few places that devote more creativity and care to the first meal of the day. I’d noticed the loaves of expensive but tasty-looking bread in the windows of the Organic Deli Cafe in the passageway between Magdalen Street and Gloucester Green but had never thought to try eating there until I heard the rumour that they did a very good breakfast. The rumour was correct.

Rick's Café, Cowley Road

Rick's Café is apparently named after the bar in Casablanca where profiteers and refugees desperate to reach America meet under the doleful eye of Humphrey Bogart, but with its cartoonish signage and wooden floors the Cowley Road version looks like any other modish coffee shop. Still, what it lacks in authentic gin joint qualities it makes up for with a few specialities of its own.

Crisis Skylight cafe at the OFS, George Street

A few days ago Starbucks had a special gimmick for a morning - you got a free coffee if you introduced yourself to the staff. This was advertising the fact that from now on they'll be taking customers' names, so that each hot drink can be matched more easily to the person who ordered it. Being a privacy-loving, sporadically misanthropic kind of person, that was enough to make me resolve to avoid buying coffee in Starbucks in future (which will save me all of about £3 a year). Still, this post won't debate the respective merits of big chains and small coffee shops, but will focus on a new(ish) Oxford establishment which is definitely worthy of your custom.

Zappi's Bike Café, St Michael's Street

I've watched the Tour de France every July for the last twenty years, enjoying the blood and sweat, the shots of the French countryside, and the bone-dry humour of Gary Imlach, but it hasn't as yet inspired me to go very far on a bike. When I was younger I learnt to ride one in a straight line but I never mastered important things like hand signals. It's probably fair to say that I don't belong in a cycle shop.

 (This was the Tour de Picardie - I would have been very lucky to get this close to the finish of a Tour de France stage)