A real favourite of Fear On Food is the small Cotswold chain of bakeries and café/restaurants, Huffkins.

Today we visited fantastic restaurant in the centre of the beautiful Cotswold town of Stow-on-the-Wold for a light lunch in the 31 Degree heat!

Having started in 1890 and still being family owned, Huffkins is a fantastic place to visit, whether you’re in Burford, Stow-on-the-Wold, Witney or Cheltenham.

It is worth quoting this extract from their website as it gives a real flavour (if you’ll excuse the pun) of what Huffkins is all about;

“highlights include being featured on ‘Heston Blumenthal’s fishy feast’ (Channel 4), voted ‘best afternoon tea in Britain’ by readers of ‘My Weekly’ magazine, Huffkins represented Britain at the British Fair in Osaka, Japan where the company opened a hugely successful ‘pop-up’ tea room serving over 2000 classic Cotswold cream teas a day!

We hand make all our breads, cakes and patisserie from scratch at our craft bakery in Witney and our tea rooms in Burford, Witney, Stow-on-the-Wold, and Cheltenham. We serve classic British dishes, freshly cooked to order, using the best possible local/seasonal ingredients.

Family-owned, the business was established in about 1890 and employs around 120 skilled, full and part time members of staff including chefs, bakers, wait-staff and head office personnel. Our bakery supplies a number of local hotels, restaurants and deli’s while our bakery shops supply freshly ‘made to order’ sandwich platters to local business’s and groups. Huffkins is an accredited supplier to the National Trust. On-line sales are currently only available to the UK”.

Unfortunately when we visited today we found the salad with one of the sandwiches to have mud and grit on it!

This was VERY unusual for Huffkins and the waitress serving was visibly horrified and immediately spoke to the kitchen staff having informed us straight away that they would remove that meal from our bill.

The staff at Huffkins really could not have done more to try to find out why this happened and rectify the situation. It turns out a new member of staff had started today in the kitchen and it had been an oversight, which as we all know can happen anywhere and is a small issue given how good the food and service always is in our experience at all Huffkins cafes.

Overall we are still firm fans of Huffkins and will continue to visit their excellent cafes whenever we’re near one, even if just to pop in for a takeaway pasty!

What we ate and drank on 14th July 2013:

1 Latte

1 Still Mineral Water

Ham and cheese sandwich on white Huffkins bread served with French fries and mixed salad

Egg and Rocket sandwich on white Huffkins bread served with French fries and mixed salad

Total (after deduction of the Egg and Rocket meal due to the salad) £10.11

Details:

Huffkins

The Square

Stow-on-the-Wold

Gloucestershire GL54 1AB

Telephone: 01451 832870

www.huffkins.com

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