If I go out for dinner by myself, in a standard generic chain pizza place, I'd be really unlikely to get of there with a bill less than £15. We went out for breakfast/brunch recently in a nicer end restaurant in Edinburgh, and I think we were just under £15 a head. At Little Chef - the closest thing we have to Denny's - we'd be about £10. Hence why the comparison that £1 = $1 The exchange rate has nothing to do with it, eating out is more expensive in the UK such that every £1 spent on food in the UK is the equivalent of $1 spent in the US.

So £20 for breakfast in a well known relatively high end restaurant, if they are using prime ingredients is not too much of a stretch in the UK. I do think that that £5 extra is about the restaurant name though, but if you are prepared to pay it, you are prepared to pay it.

At the other end of the scale are the £20 generic chain hotel breakfasts. Buffet breakfasts with a buffet full of poor quality items - which in fairness are usually not cooked too badly, but where the bacon, black pudding and sausage is poor quality nasty rubbish (still edible and enjoyable though ) the mushrooms are tinned, the scrambled eggs are powdered, and the hash browns are frozen. Toast comes out of one of those awful machines where you have to hover to get them out at the other end, the butter is rock solid and the bread for the toast is the cheapest sliced cotton wool bread imaginable. The choice of fruit juice selection is orange or apple, and the glasses are the smallest thimbles in the world.

Those places are hell. You only eat there if it's included in the price, or you are hungover.