What's for breakfast? Check out Pinky's in Tampa and the Tick Tock in St. Petersburg

TAMPA — New favorite Tampa experience: skating the length of Bayshore Boulevard on a breezy Sunday morning, sliding those tired dogs into flip-flops and heading up Bay to Bay to put your name in for a table at Pinky's (the signup stand is a nice touch, a fashion dummy severed at the waist with a podium top affixed to it). Pour yourself a cup of coffee (self-serve in mix-and-match mugs) and eavesdrop. South Tampa families, lovers in next-day, omelet-eating languor, UT academics — it feels like a hip, big-city breakfast favorite already.

Jacob Shirai, formerly of Soho Sushi, Bern's and other Tampa restaurants, and Steve White, who runs Cappy's Pizzeria across the street, opened Pinky's at the beginning of the year at the site of the defunct Bean There Cafe. It's frenetic and the wait can be a while, servers with their game-day faces whisking around plates of oatmeal pancakes and cafe con leches (exceptionally rich).

The core of the menu is the frittata, an open-faced omelet studded with an array of meats, veggies and herbs. My favorite was the Mexican with chorizo, onion and green pepper, topped with cheddar and little dollops of salsa and sour cream ($7.95; and I added a side of avocado, $1.95, to cap it off), but a Greek version with spinach and kalamata olives ($7.95) made a mighty fine morning meal. Accompanying potatoes, fruit and sides don't quite hit the heights of nearby Datz Deli, but service at Datz of late has been so hit-or-miss that I'm sticking with Pinky's.

If you can manage, Wednesday is the day to go. Shirai cures his own bacon from scratch, kind of a side hobby, which Wednesday morning customers get to sample. The rest-of-the-week bacon is nothing to sniff at, best sampled at the core of a tremendous, and absurdly messy, fried egg sandwich ($6.95). It's my favorite thing on the menu, its heap of cheddar, Swiss, tomato, bacon, mayo and over-easy eggs leaking out the thick seven-grain toast.

Shirai is more proud of his oatmeal pancakes with strawberries (the rat demurred on sharing his recipe for today's pancake story, Page 1E). Definitely a mighty flapjack ($6.95, $2.95 for a single cake), best attempted after running the caloric odometer backward on Bayshore.

S t. Petersburg — When I say "breakfast all day," your mind gets busy, doesn't it? A diner with vinyl booths, waitresses who, ideally, call you "hon" and wear orthopedic shoes, that white sausage gravy that might qualify as a WMD and chicken-fried steak. • Tick Tock Restaurant was opened in June by three brothers, Steve, Mike and George Houvardas. The space itself was inherited from Marbo Chinese Restaurant, not exactly Architectural Digest material. But that seems fitting for a place where all day you'll hear servers explaining the difference between the home fries (like hash browns) and the breakfast potatoes (little hunks) while refilling bottomless mugs of serviceable coffee.

Omelets are fluffy ($3.95 to $7.75), as are pancakes ($3.75 to $5.95, best iteration the banana pecan), but I was most impressed with the breakfast sandwiches. You can get an open-faced bagel topped with poached eggs and cheddar ($5.25; yes, it does look disconcertingly like its name: "bagel eyes"); scrambled eggs tucked into a pita with ham and cheese ($5.95); or an absurdly perfect post-revelry food, a breakfast burger ($6.95) that piles fried egg, bacon, tomato and mozzarella on the patty. Add a big pool of ketchup to the accompanying home fries (they beat out the breakfast potatoes or the sturdy-but-bland grits) and it's better than two Advil.

Tick Tock is the kind of place that often goes unsung, flying under the radar for review consideration. But sometimes a couple of pork chops with eggs over easy ($7.95) seems just the ticket. After all, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right?

Laura Reiley can be reached at lreiley@sptimes.com or (727) 892-2293. Her blog, the Mouth of Tampa Bay, is at www.blogs.tampabay.com/dining. Reiley dines anonymously and unannounced. The Times pays all expenses. Advertising has nothing to do with selection for review or the assessment.