The North Circular’s Ace Cafe is destination dining for the authentic British fry-up — restaurant review

A few years ago, I wrote enthusiastically about a visit to Florence Central Market and what was then an unavoidable foodie digression, the tripe bap, or lampredotto, at Da Nerbone.

The Mercato Centrale was originally the main produce market for the city, a proper place with the sort of grimy authenticity that brought acolytes like me from all over the world.

Da Nerbone had reputedly been there from way back in the swirling dark of the market’s history, serving the sort of speciality that only occurs in these venues. Tripe from butchers just yards from the stall was poached for days in great tanks, then slapped into fresh bread and drenched in fiery chilli sauces. It was cheap, filling and nutritious fuel for the hard physical work of humping sacks and carcasses.

These days, the market has been zhuzhed like London’s own dear Borough. When I joined the queue at Da Nerbone for the first time I was jammed between a couple of Japanese students carrying thousands of euros worth of miniaturised video equipment and an American earnestly “journaling” in a Moleskine. The tripe buns still fly out, but with much of the sense of discovery gone. And without the feeling of bravery, exploration and personal challenge, I found myself thinking; it’s stomach lining in a bun, masked with hot sauce. I mean, it’s not really very nice.

Each time I jetted off to follow up some fascinating intersection of food and culture, I drove past the Ace on my way to Heathrow and didn’t see it

But then, you wonder, perhaps it’s not about the food. Which brings me, in a roundabout way to the A406, London’s North Circular, and the Ace Cafe. The shabby commercial hinterlands of Wembley and Park Royal form a fantastically atmospheric part of London. The Park Royal side was originally home to the giant factories of McVitie’s, Heinz and Guinness, the Wembley side the location of the 1924 British Empire Exhibition. Now it has merged into a gigantic splash of branded sheds and barns, one of the biggest industrial estates in the country.

The Ace, in its original incarnation, was built in 1938 as a transport café to feed truck drivers on the A-road network. In 1940 it was bombed, then in 1949 completely rebuilt in a sort of odd hybrid Deco/Jetsons style. Because the lorries rolled day and night, particularly in the days before motorways, tachographs and Working Time Directives, drivers needed food, drink and bathrooms round the clock, and because it stayed open all night, when all other attractions were firmly shut, the Ace drew the new “teenagers”. Young working-class kids on cheap motorcycles, looking for excitement, eggs and bacon.

In 1964, director Sidney Furie shot The Leather Boys at the Ace, an astonishingly daring film in the hyper-realistic, kitchen sink style of the period about a young mechanic torn between his conventional marriage and his attraction to a handsome biker. The café closed in 1969, as the biker subculture subsided, and the truck drivers were drawn to the tawdry glister of the new Scratchwood Services. The building became a tyre fitting workshop, providing a pleasing automotive continuity, and then reopened as a café in 1997.

You only go to the Ace for breakfast, just at any time of the day. There are other things on the menu, but once you’ve looked around the immense room, the ceiling-height windows pouring grey sunlight over Formica tables and scabbed lino, you know it’s got to be a fry-up. A mug, boiling water from an ancient spigot, milk from a plastic jug and the tea bag resolutely left in.

The bacon’s good. A couple of big slices of posh “back” with a good layer of fat. There’s a halved tomato — a halfhearted tip of the helmet to your five a day — and a quality sausage, wrinkly but full of the proper flavours of white pepper and mace, the characteristic ras-el-hanout of English pork butchery. There’s a hefty ladle of mushrooms, long-stewed in something good and oily, and a dollop of bubble and squeak scorched and crisped on the hotplate. The eggs have been fried, lacy from all the oil, some flicked back over the top to seal the yolks. There’s a sombre disc of black pudding running heavy to cereal fillers but decently fudgy in texture. It’s pretty good . . . but more importantly, it feels authentic. It hasn’t been poncified. There’s nothing in it that would have looked out of place in 1951 or might alienate the crew of a highway repair wagon. I know this because they were sitting next to me in a blinding muddle of hi-vis and helmetry. In a big American city, this place would be humming with locals and tourists. Here, it’s out and beyond, and the people who make the pilgrimage are mainly “petrolheads”. Old blokes with old cars, old bikes, soft eyes and long memories.

This isn’t a critique of the Ace. With a pedigree like that, how could I dare? No, it’s more a critique of myself as a food lover and perhaps others of my type.

I flew to Florence to eat boiled tripe (average) in what was once a market worker’s café, and I loved it. I once went to Los Angeles and made a special detour to sit in Pat and Lorraine’s Coffee Shop, where the opening sequence of Reservoir Dogs was shot. I was so awed by the significance, I barely noticed the breakfast (also average). There were other trips too. Each time, as I jetted off to follow up some fascinating intersection of food and culture, I drove past the Ace on my way to Heathrow and didn’t see it. Significant in the history of the postwar road network, the Blitz, the British motorcycle industry, tabloid media spirals over biker-gang terror, realist and queer cinema, working-class youth culture, rock music, architecture and an extremely competent execution of our national dish. If it was anywhere other than my own beat, I’d have travelled there to write about it years ago.