For a long time, a friend of mine has based her summer holiday almost entirely around a single restaurant, returning to the same place year after year to make full and liberal use of its delicious menu. I used to wonder about this. The crab sandwiches sounded excellent, and the cod and chips. But I sometimes wondered if she didn't ever have the urge to plan a trip around something other than this miraculous cafe. Didn't she ever hanker for picturesque ruins, or a good gallery? What about walking? After a really long walk, I'm usually so hungry, the question of whether the potatoes are local and organic, and the chicken free-range, seems almost not to matter (emphasis on the almost). It turns out, though, that I was missing the point. As I discovered the other weekend, it's not that the right caff can improve a trip immeasurably; it's that it can make it. All the more so should you happen to stumble on it by chance.
We were in Sussex for the bank holiday, and I'd booked us into a pub in East Dean, a village which, when I Googled it, looked to be brilliantly close to the sea at Birling Gap and to have come straight out of Miss Marple (in fact, it has a link with another famous detective, being supposedly the place where Sherlock Holmes retired). The plan was that we would eat a giant cooked breakfast at the pub, walk all day, and then head out in the evening for supper, to Alfriston or Eastbourne, or perhaps even to the Curlew at Bodiam, where some young dude reputedly does moderately exciting things with foam. But then the plan went awry. For one thing, the cooked breakfasts weren't up to snuff. For another, the weather was mostly freakishly good, so we were able to be outside all day. Result: by midday, we could have eaten a ranch.
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