Magpie Café
14 Pier Road, Whitby, North Yorkshire, YO21 3PU
About
The black and white building on Pier Road with the queue outside it, and the single most argued-about restaurant on this coast. The Magpie serves fish and chips alongside a much longer seafood menu, and the queue that forms along the harbour railings in all weathers is a genuine Whitby landmark rather than a marketing line: the cafe's own website leads on it. Locals are split between treating it as the benchmark and treating it as the place you send visitors while you go somewhere with less of a wait. Both positions are defensible. Book if you can, because the reservation route skips the queue entirely, and take the fish of the day rather than defaulting to cod if you want to see what the kitchen actually does with what came off the boats.
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Features
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