Café at the Cat & Dog Steps — Restaurant in Sunderland

Positively the best place to catch the early morning sunshine. There's some lovely tables right on the promenade and you can look out across to the lighthouse. I love nothing more than a Nice cheap, no frills bacon butty and a coffee in the sunshine, any time if the year . Although just lately it's not the friendliest service with the new owners.

It always seems to attract a huge amount of elderly people just sitting in the sun first thing on a morning. Always makes me chuckle! And of course a huge amount of dog walkers. You can walk round the bay on the sand when the tide is low and often when dolphins and seals are spotted along the coast its here...

I love this part of sunderland I will always have the best memories here as a child playing in the rock pools with my brothers and sisters and our dad sat there watching us with his usual huge smile and a gigantic bag of food and pop for us. He would always rent a deckchair and sit there with a brew and watch us 5 kids run around just loving life. Not long before my dad passed away in 2016 me and my partner took him along here and i just sat and watched my dad remminice about these years and I sat there with a huge smile and I like to think that on that day my dad was loving his life. I...

Thanks to the headlands on either side this is a relatively secluded beach, and the cliffs above shelter it from the wind. It can be accessed from the Seaburn end by the promenade, and at low tide from the Roker Park end by the beach. There are also the eponymous cat and dog steps, a set of rather precipitous cliff steps (not to be taken lightly) for those in a hurry. At high tide beware, it's easy to find yourself cut off and facing an undignified plodge...