White Row Cafe at White Row Farm

Heading home from Heathrow after a fab week in Morocco (including eating lots of cake – reviews to follow!), we decided to pop into White Row Cafe for a bite of lunch.

Having driven past many, many times, we discovered this cafe a few months ago and popped in for a slice of cake and cup of tea, which were fantastic. The cafe is in a really convenient location on the A36 and is part of a small farm complex with a large farm shop (including fresh fish counter and butcher), florist and gift shop, and fish and chip shop. The farm shop won Best Farm Shop in Bath in September this year. It’s got a great outdoor space, including picnic tables, play stuff for kids and farm animals to take a look at.

Visiting on a Wednesday lunchtime, we were surprised how busy the place was – it’s a fairly large cafe and we were lucky to get the last free table. It was filled with a wide variety of people – families, couples, friends of all ages. Despite this, the service was quick and friendly.

The lunch menu had fairly standard cafe options – soups, sandwiches, baguettes, paninis, jacket potatoes, omelettes and a daily specials board. They take pride in using their own produce or that from local named suppliers wherever possible. Feeling cold and hungry after a fairly long car journey, I opted for a jacket potato with prawns (about £6), which came served with a side salad and coleslaw. The jacket potato was huge, with a nice crispy skin, and there was a decent serving of prawns in Marie Rose sauce – which I couldn’t actually finish (so handed on over to the EHH). EHH had a Coronation Chicken baguette (again about £6), which he declared tasty and the bread good. We shared a pot of tea for two, which came in a nice large china tea pot, with a generous jug of milk, providing about two and a half cups of tea each.        

Having stuffed ourselves with our main courses, we didn’t have room for cake, even though there was a very tempting display of delicious looking home-made cakes. An impressive array of 13 cakes included marmalade cake, lemon drizzle, fruitcake, chocolate hedgehog cake (which looked suspiciously like tiffin to me!), and carrot cake. They also stock a range of packaged gluten-free treats, which was good to see. On our last visit, I tried their lemon drizzle cake and it was incredibly good – moist and really lemony!

Overall, I’d highly recommend this cafe – food, service and atmosphere all great. It’s clearly popular and deserves to be so. We’ll definitely be back – with more time so that I can have a potter around the farm shop and gift shop. Would be tempted to visit for breakfast, which is very reasonably priced and I imagine would be fantastic, or for fish and chips!