Road Side Cafe Glammed Up (Little Chef)

Member Name: Squiggles

Product:	Little Chef
Date:	24/05/01 (657 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Extended menu, Vegetarian options

Disadvantages: Expensive

It’s been a good while since I last set foot in a Little Chef restaurant, over a year in fact, until a week ago that is. I’d always remembered them as expensive places to eat, not particularly comfortable and with rather a bland café style menu and a long wait for your meal to arrive at your table. But I have to admit to being very pleasantly surprised!

We visited the Little Chef just outside Thame, towards Oxford. There have been some major changes since I was last there, including the addition of a Burger King Drive-Thru right next door (hey Excelle - I do have one closer now, double bacon cheeseburgers, yayyyy!!) The Little Chef restaurant itself is very roomy, lots of good quality wooden tables and with very comfortable seating, complete with nice thick padded cushions. Considerably better than the old days of hard wooden seating and plastic topped tables!

The first thing I noticed was that they were now offering a selection of goodies you could purchase too, arranged neatly in a display section close to the entrance. Here you could buy sweets and snacks for your journey, including a rather odd selection of cassettes for playing in the car. The prices weren’t exactly cheap tho, but they did have a very good selection of bottled drinks in the fridge, again, with a hefty price mark-up. Oh, and a good selection of newspapers and magazines too.

When we arrived, they weren’t particularly busy and we were shown to a table very quickly and our drink orders were taken. We asked if the place was licensed, and the waitress apologised and said she was sorry, but no it wasn’t, not just yet anyway. And yet the menu before us offered us a choice of bottled beers and red and white wines! Somewhat puzzling! We assumed the menu must be a universal one and that the Thame branch was just a little slow in obtaining its license.

The nicest change I discovered, was that Little Chef have vastly improved their menu and
now offer a much wider selection of main courses, including some good vegetarian dishes. Pricewise, a little expensive for what is basically a glammed up roadside café, but the menu shows all the choices available as photographs of the meals (on plates!) so you can see at a glance what to expect.

The waitress was quick to take our order and we were given a choice of which ‘potato’ we could have and we sat back expecting a long wait for our meals to arrive. I’d chosen the Little Chef Mixed Grill to satisfy my bacon obsession (but that’s ANOTHER story!!) and my friends, who were mostly vegetarian, had plumped for the Brie and Broccoli En Croute, with a choice of either jacket potato or fries.

The meals when they arrived were surprisingly good, and we had a fairly short wait for our food too. My grill consisted of a choice of grilled chicken breast or two burgers, along with bacon, 2 sausages, 2 fried eggs, sauté potatoes, onion rings and tomato. It was mostly very tasty, and was freshly cooked; my only criticism being that the sausages were a little chewy but the eggs were perfect, with a nice runny yolk just right for dipping! The Brie and Broccoli dish seemed to meet with approval from my pals too, their only minor gripe was that it was difficult to detect the subtle flavour of the Brie!

The menu now offers a good range of dishes with something for everybody and the average price seems to be around £5 to £8 per main course. They offer a range of all day breakfasts (mostly grills) for the hungry traveller, as well as more traditional dishes including beef and gammon steak meals, traditional pies and even liver and onions! A fair range of fish dishes are also included, scampi, salmon, low fat options and good old fish and chips. And of course, a selection of burgers, both beef and chicken and a vegetarian option. You can also opt for a side order, with a choice between a side salad, mixed vegetables and garlic brea
d. Or instead, you can choose to add items to accompany your meal from the Chef List, such as mushrooms, hash browns, fries, onion rings, bread and butter, coleslaw, extra vegetables and so on.

You can choose from a smallish range of starters if you’re feeling really peckish (7 in all) to include the usual sorts of dishes such as prawn cocktail and soup of the day, also mushrooms in breadcrumbs, chicken wings, spicy potato wedges and pate and toast.

We were too full to have dessert, but there is a good choice if you can squeeze one in and the menu certainly made them look tempting. Little Chef’s traditional pancakes are always a good choice, very yummy, or you can choose from a range of ice cream desserts or plump for something a little more substantial including fruit pies and sticky gooey cakes!

Whilst there, I had a chance to check out the conveniences too and have to admit to being very impressed with the Ladies (I did wonder about popping in to the Gents to give it a good once over, purely for the benefit of this review you understand, but the thought of being arrested and thrown in a cell put me off a bit!). The facilities were spotless, incredibly clean with a nice fragrant ‘air freshener’ type smell and good towels and hand washing facilities.

Overall, we had a good meal and I believe that Little Chef have made real efforts to improve their roadside café image. Yes, most of the fayre on offer is still fairly basic, but you are given a much wider choice now and they seem to be catering much better for vegetarians. The service seems to have improved by far, the waitress was helpful and smiling and we weren’t kept waiting at all. Pricewise, a little expensive maybe but the atmosphere was pleasant and the seating was very comfortable. Some major improvements! Oh, and they also have a website too, check out www.little-chef.co.uk for a complete list of meals available and the latest on new restau
rants etc. Plus an easy to enter competition for any Lego fans!

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