Breakfast is the one meal a day where dessert becomes the main course, where sweet and salty mix comfortably on a plate, and where eggs take a starring role. These are just some reasons we love breakfast. Unfortunately, the perception is that Honolulu doesn't cut it as a breakfast town. The choices are limited, critics say, and by the time we roll out of bed on a weekend morning, eateries have moved on to serving lunch. Yet, after tasting our way through town during the early-morning hours, we found lots of great breakfast plates worth waking up for.

BOGART'S CAFE

3045 Monsarrat Ave.

739-0999

Belgian waffle with bananas, $7.25

One of our favorite things about breakfast is food topped with whipped cream. Especially when it's a deep Belgian waffle, covered in sliced bananas and dusted with powdered sugar. With the lightly sweetened cream and powdered sugar, this waffle doesn't need syrup, and we'd rather save its delicately crisp texture from syrup sogginess.

MIX CAFE

35 S. Beretania St.

537-1191

Bruno's omelet with bacon, $5.75

The best deal in town is Bruno's omelet at Mix Cafe. It's a perfect breakfast on a weekend or before work to chase away the weekday blues. Watch your eggs come together in front of you, sometimes by Bruno himself. These eggs are mixed with kabocha, red bell pepper, onion and mushroom (ingredients vary depending on what's fresh that day). Wide strips of bacon are served on the side, with toast and jam.

DIAMOND HEAD COVE HEALTH BAR

3045 Monsarrat Ave.

732-8744

Da Cove Bowl, $7.50

Sweet or savory? Healthy or not? Always a tough decision for breakfast. If we decide on healthy, an acai bowl is never a decision we regret. One of the best bowls is at Da Cove: acai blended with strawberries and topped with not-too-sweet granola, bananas, an occasional strawberry and honey. Our favorite part is when the honey hardens slightly from the cold acai, for a taffy-like consistency.

ANDY'S SANDWICHES AND SMOOTHIES

2904 E. Manoa Road

988-6161

French toast, $4.95

Andy's serves basic, no-frills breakfast in addition to their popular sandwiches. A favorite is their French toast, made with sweetbread (a whole-wheat option is available), lightly dipped in batter and dusted with cinnamon. Andy's can get packed; we prefer taking our breakfast to go to avoid jostling elbows in their crowded space.

WELL BEING PORRIDGE

911 Ke'eaumoku St.

946-3377

Chicken porridge, $8.99

With the recent cold weather, we wanted a warm breakfast to drive away the morning chill. It might not be the first thing one associates with breakfast (depending on one's ethnic upbringing), but we found rice porridge to be the perfect savory alternative to oatmeal. Well Being Porridge serves wonderfully flavorful rice porridge all morning (and throughout the day). The chicken porridge is gingery and peppery with soft bits of dark meat mixed throughout. It comes with panchan that wake up the appetite: kimchee, slightly sweet pickled jalapenos and onions, and sesame gai lan.

CAFE KAILA

Market City Shopping Center

732-3330

Buttermilk pancakes with strawberries, $7.95

A breakfast gallery needs an entry from Cafe Kaila, breakfast's newest darling that serves our favorite meal all day. While it's hard to go wrong with anything on the menu, we chose a breakfast classic they do extraordinarily well: pancakes. They're light and tender, with a touch of cinnamon that complements pure maple syrup. (Cafe Kaila is one of the few breakfast eateries that serves real maple syrup.)

LOX OF BAGELS

111 Sand Island Access Road

845-2855

Manhattan Delight, $8.49

A New Yorker named this bagel shop as his favorite, with the Manhattan Delight topping his list of breakfast musts. This New York-style bagel sandwich includes slightly salty lox, cold cream cheese that almost melts against a toasted bagel, red onions for bite, and capers for zing. All this, topped with tomatoes, sprouts and lettuce, makes for a difficult but satisfying bite.

For even more flavor, request one of their whipped, flavored cream cheeses, like garden vegetable or cucumber onion dill.

TOWN

3435 Wai'alae Ave.

735-5900

Breakfast burrito, $8

Town's breakfast burrito is a neat package that can be eaten with one hand, while the other flips a newspaper. But it's hard not to focus all your attention on this breakfast, with eggs, bacon, and potatoes wrapped into a lightly griddled tortilla and served with a side of cool sour cream and fresh pico de gallo.

CINNAMON'S RESTAURANT

315 Uluniu St.

261-8724

Guava chiffon pancakes, $6.29 for two

Kailua has no shortage of breakfast places, one of the most popular being Cinnamon's, known for their special pancake flavors like carrot cake and pumpkin bread.

A friend recommended the guava chiffon: extra-tall pancakes covered in a guava glaze.

To be honest, we looked at the unnaturally pink syrup coating our pancakes and prepared ourselves for a sickly sweet experience.

But it wasn't the case. The sweet and tangy syrup isn't any sweeter than the usual pancake syrup, while providing a nice, fruity flavor.

GRAND CAFE & BAKERY

31 N. Pauahi St.

531-0001

"Remember when ..." fresh corned beef hash, $11.35

From the plates to wallpaper to the corned beef hash, Grand Cafe & Bakery conjures up nostalgia for a past we never had. So although we don't "remember when ...", we will remember their corned beef hash, slightly vinegary from the corned beef brine, providing a nice complement to the side of eggs with fresh ground pepper.

The potatoes O'Brien, though, really steal the show.

Perfectly crisp, fried cubes of potatoes sauteed with red onions and bell peppers make up a side dish we could eat day and night.