Rosemarino, not quite new anymore but the little Italian restaurant everybody’s talking about, occupies the site of the old York Café in Clifton, and as well as serving dinner they have embraced the York Café’s former mantle of serving the best breakfast in Bristol. Well, brunch if you, like us, don’t like to rise early on a Sunday. In fact we went around midday and collided with lunch which was also being served, a nice looking plate of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with all the trimmings if you’re interested.

Rather typically Italian in that the space is small and diners are elbow to elbow, a merry chatter filled the light and airy upstairs and Sunday papers were strewn about with gay abandon. The brunch menu is quite extensive ranging from "Tommy’s One Pan Wonder", bacon, onions, mushrooms and potatoes fried in the said one pan, with two eggs cracked on top and melted cheese served with toast to a more sedate "Eggs Royale", muffin, smoked salmon, poached eggs and hollandaise sauce. There are also pastries and homemade granola and yoghurt for the continental breakfast lovers.

We ordered Eggs Benedict (as Royale but with speck instead of smoked salmon) and the Rosemarino Breakfast, pork sausage, Vince’s local black pudding, streaky bacon, sautéed potatoes, egg, mushrooms, tomato and beans, or in this case firmly without beans, and toast. They have a nice range of coffees and teas, so we took one macchiato and a blended tea, which I initially thought was a choice between ginger, peppermint, cardamom etc., but which was in fact a blend of all of them, and a couple of orange juices. The orange juice was served very nicely with ice and a chunky slice of orange and was ice cold; the tea was a delight in that it came in a dinky little glass teapot so you could see all tea blend infusing and it was your choice to decide when it was brewed. I really liked it, primarily ginger it was very refreshing.

We both enjoyed our breakfasts very much, the poached eggs were perfectly cooked - a neat trick if you can do it - and the Rosemarino full breakfast was lovely too, really crisp bacon, jolly good black pudding, the only slight criticism being that both dishes could have been a tad hotter. They are extremely child-friendly; every fourth diner was under nine months and also dog-friendly (we were amused to see a lady carrying out a small dog in a custom-made canvas carrier - wonder what he ate?) which is the Italian way and much the better for it. At around £24.00 for two it made a great start to the day.