THE ALLEY, the Oakland bar that I gushed and gooed all over last week in this column, doesn't open until 4 p.m., and doesn't start cooking until 6 p.m., and Rod Dibble doesn't start tickling the ivories until, what, 9:30 p.m.

I woke up at around 9 a.m. in the morning on my brother's couch in West Oakland, which is where I generally sleep when I stay down here. Normally I have a whole room with a whole bed with 10 pillows and a table with a mirror and everything, but our nephew Steve, a migrant worker from North Carolina, had taken over "my" room.

That's cool. I like the couch. I like sleeping in the belly of a house instead of one of the extremities. My own shack doesn't even have extremities. It's all belly. Plus I get up before anyone else. In the world. So this way, if I'm somewhere where other people are, like West Oakland, they can keep sleeping while I make my coffee and walk around with it, looking at things and thinking thoughts and shit. Farting and scratching. Riffling through their cupboards and refrigerators for stuff to eat, et cetera.

I don't think I've slept in until 9:00 a.m. in the morning since before I was a chicken farmer. But this was a Sunday after a super-late Saturday night, so still I was the first one up. Steve was second, and he poured himself the last of my little pot of coffee and started looking around for sugar.

"Riffling?" I said.

He said, "Huh?"

"What are you looking for?"

"Sugar."

I went straight to the spices cupboard, thinking, "Sugar and spice," and handed him a jar of granulated white stuff. "Try this," I said. "Taste it first." I swear I warned him.

He sniffed it, nodded familiarly, and dumped a couple, two, three tablespoons into his mug, and we went and sat down at the dining room table.

I drink my coffee black.

So we're chitchatting about, you know, Emersonian notions of compensation vis-à-vis the pre-postmodernist distinction between circumstance (in a purely natural sense) and "causal retribution" – just waiting for the caffeine to kick in so we could move on to more serious subjects, like what's for breakfast. And all of a sudden, four or five sips into it, Stevie gives his mug a little shake, takes a sniff, and says, "I don't think that was sugar."

"What was it?" I said, laughing, and helping myself to a taste. I sprayed the most oceanic mouthful of coffee I ever tasted all over the dining room table. It was sea salt. I had to go brush my teeth again, drink a pint of ice water with lemons in it, and pat my tongue dry with a flour tortilla before I could even stand the taste of my own mouth again.

Phenomenon and Deevee don't drink coffee, and this was the last of my personal stash. We couldn't find a desalination plant in any of their cupboards, either, so we had to leave them sleeping and go for a drive. That was how we wound up across town at Lynn and Lu's, just a few doors down from the Alley. Nice, bright place, with huge skylights and a whole patio, if skylights ain't enough sky for you. Good coffee, clearly distinguished salt and sugar. And, get this:

Dan's Breakfast! Right there on the menu. Two eggs and a hamburger patty – so, alas, they must mean some other Dan, because I'll be damned if I'm getting a hamburger patty over sausage. Let alone eggs. I got the oatmeal pancakes, made with real whole wheat, and a side of mild Italian sausage. Excellent pancakes. They come with that blueberry compost stuff, but you can ask for regular syrup too. I did, for the sausage.

Steve got a frittata.

They had an "Ohio" omelet, and guess what it was. A plain omelet. Let's see, what can we call the one with nothing at all in it, just eggs? I know: Ohio.

I'm not easily offended, myself, but on my nephew's behalf, because he's originally from Ohio too, I asked the waitressperson why it was called an Ohio omelet. She said she didn't know.

"We're from Ohio," I said. "We like ... things ... in our omelets."

"And coffee," Steve quipped.

What a guy! How he ever managed to swallow as much of that salt-water swill as he did, before saying anything ... speaking of things in coffee. Small stones, a marble, BBs, Emerson, even me: we all could have floated.

Lynn and Lu's. 3353 Grand (at Elwood), Oakl. (510) 835-5705. Mon.-Fri., 7:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Takeout available. No alcohol. MasterCard, Visa. Wheelchair accessible.

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Dan Leone is the author of Eat This, San Francisco (Sasquatch Books), a collection of Cheap Eats restaurant reviews, and The Meaning of Lunch (Mammoth Books).