The Galley Diner

South Boston is a peninsula of old row houses and working waterfront, and on a side street a few blocks from the water, a small diner with a long counter has been feeding the neighbourhood since the middle of the last century. The Galley Diner is exactly what its name suggests: a narrow room, a griddle, stools at the counter, and a menu built around eggs, hash and the kind of breakfast that gets people through a Boston winter. Anthony Bourdain came through for No Reservations, and this is the Boston he was after — not the tourist version, but the one where the accents are thick and everybody at the counter knows each other.

The dish to order is the corned beef hash, and it is the reason the place has a reputation. This is not the grey stuff from a tin; it is corned beef chopped with potato and onion, pressed onto the griddle and fried until the bottom is a dark, crisp crust, then turned out under eggs cooked to your liking. It arrives with toast and coffee and it is one of the great American breakfasts, precisely because it takes time and a flat-top and no shortcuts at all. Add a short stack if you have the appetite, and keep the coffee coming.

Come early on a weekday, because the counter fills with people on their way to work and the room does not hold many. It is cash-friendly, unpretentious, and loud in the way that small rooms full of people are loud.

Bourdain understood that a city's food is often at its best in the places that have no ambition beyond feeding their own neighbourhood, and the Galley Diner is that idea served hot on a plate, with hash on the side.