21.5/30 Limes Farm, Farthinghoe

Overall Score 21.5/30

Food               7/10
Venue             4/5
Service           3/5
Value              4/5
Cleanliness     3.5/5

http://www.limesfarm.com/

We really like going to Limes Farm.  It's a favourite with the family as well and we often go here for Mothers Day.

Today we noticed that just a few small things made a big difference to our visit

The breakfast was really good.  Just the right amount of food and extremely high quality ingredients.  We both opted not to have black pudding and noted that we weren't given a choice over how to have our eggs cooked.  They arrived fried and were just a little bit runny in the white of the egg.  The bacon tasted much better than it looked.  Presentation let this down and I have a personal preference for slightly crispy bacon.  I loved the parsley as part of the presentation.  It's great to have a little green on the breakfast plate.

The let down for us started with not having the promised toast delivered to the table.  At first I'd thought this was to follow separately but with our view from the gallery I could see that other breakfasts were coming out with toast on the plate.  We then had to wait until we could catch the attention of a waitress to point this out meaning that we had the toast after we'd finished the breakfast itself.

This highlighted our biggest disappointment in that the waitresses came upstairs on several occassions but just delivered their orders without looking round to check to see if anyone wanted anything.  At one point I even made eye contact with one of them and she went straight back downstairs.  When we did get her attention and pointed out the lack of toast she asked if we wanted it now looked at our empty plates and then left them while she went and sorted the toast, only clearing them once she returned with toast.  The toast was delivered with jam as an extra although this was quite tricky to eat as it was very runny.

As mentioned we love the venue.  It's on a farm and, though we never have, you can wander round the farm which includes two lakes.  The building for the cafe is lovely, an old barn that retains many features and has the lovely mezzanine floor which we chose to sit on.  From our seat we could overlook the main room with the till/coffee area and the homemade cakes.

The cakes were tempting but would have been more so had they been covered.  All visitors to the cafe have to walk past the cakes on the way to the tables and as such we would prefer them to be covered and protected from sneezes and children's fingers.

This review may sound slightly negative but we really would like to point out that these are all small things that would only take a small effort to rectify.  The farm really have worked incredibly hard to expand on their offerings and offer Yurt accommodation, pie nights, courses, and even provide school meals.

Well worth a visit!