JUST LIKE school on Monday...all class. Fat Albert's is in session just for breakfast.

Mothers are right to fuss about breakfast. When you get up in the morning your brain hasn't had a fresh shot of glucose for several hours. Odds are good you didn't eat much complex carbohydrate the night before, so your body starts straining to convert the fat and protein left over from that Häagen-Dazs bedtime snack into something the lump of gray matter between your ears finds useful. And of course you're late, so you run for the bus to get to work or school or whatever fills the daylight hours, and you get by until lunch on a nonfat latte.

If you'd taken the time to have a couple of eggs, you'd feel much better.

While some killjoys advocate a number of supposedly more healthful alternatives, the "incredible edible egg" is hard to beat. A typical 80-calorie egg is almost three-fourths water and only 11 percent fat, and much of that is unsaturated oleic acid, one of the "good" fats (it's also found in olive oil). It's got all of your amino acids as well as vitamin A, the B vitamins (thiamin, riboflavin and niacin) and vitamin D. There's not much better for kick-starting the synapses first thing in the morning. What's more, eggs taste great. I'm partial to them cooked gently in butter, flipped over easy to set the white and leave the yolk runny for sopping up with a piece of toast. With a rasher of good bacon and a mound of crusty home fries, you've got the perfect breakfast.

You can make this at home, of course, but a proper breakfast is even more satisfying when eaten in a small cafe with the windows fogged from the steam of the open grill and a friendly server who might call you "hon" while refilling a thick porcelain mug with strong black coffee. In the mythic America of the 1950s, such roadside diners and urban coffeeshops were ubiquitous. Here in Portland at the start of the new century, they're not so easy to find. Which is why Fat Albert's in Westmoreland usually has a line outside. This archetypal cafe opens early and closes just after lunchtime, and it serves nothing but breakfast. Open since October, it's quickly become one of the neighborhhood's favorite morning spots.

A pair of fry cooks dance around the tiny open kitchen, one pivoting to offer an omelet platter to the waitress and the other ducking in to spoon some pancake batter onto the grill. Customers squeeze into the narrow space, filling the eclectic collection of mismatched tables and chairs or perching at one of the stools along the short counter. The one-page menu doesn't leave time for pondering, and the servers return with plates of hot food so quickly you forget about the 15-minute wait for a table.

A half-dozen omelets top the selection, from a basic ham-n-cheese to the quaintly '80s-retro "Yuppie" filled with dried tomatoes, garlic, red onion, artichoke hearts and feta. Kim's Fave features an unctuous blend of avocado and cheddar with crispy bacon, while the Salad Eater blends fresh spinach, tomatoes, onion and mushrooms with Swiss cheese (the default is raw vegetables, but you can get them sautéed if you ask).

In an interesting etymological construct, Fat Albert's uses "home browns" to describe potatoes that have been sliced and fried crisp on the grill, what almost everyone else calls "home fries." By any name, they're good spuds. To make things even more confusing, "hash browns" are available as an option, but this pre-cooked, industrial shredded-potato product is best avoided altogether.

If you want something besides eggs, big buttermilk pancakes hit just the right level of tender chewiness, and they don't get soggy after a healthy dose of real maple syrup. The blueberry option for another buck is well worth it. If you really must, the bottomless bucket of oatmeal provides an all-day, stick-to-your-ribs sort of breakfast.

While the biscuits are tender and a nice alternative to toast, skip the country gravy. It's way too thick and pasty, and it just sits on top of the biscuits instead of soaking in. Take a tip, Albert: less flour, more sausage in the gravy. The coffee is good, but an espresso machine is almost mandatory these days. If you need something stronger, you can walk down to the local Starbucks while you're waiting. And a plate of fried eggs, bacon, potatoes and toast comes just the way I like it. It really is the most important meal of the day.