Lanercost Tea Room - A Tasteem Review

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The Lanercost Tea Room is situated outside the Lanercost Priory, close to Hadrian’s Wall which in turn is close to the Scottish border.

We arrived quite hungry but not expecting a lot, this being one of those café add-ons designed for tourists. If it was going to be decent, then that would be a bonus!

One positive aspect was it was a new building, and clean. On entering noticed to the left was the dog-friendly restaurant, but with us being dog-free on this occasion we turned right and entered a medium-sized sitting area which was reasonably full.

This is not one of those ‘wait to be seated’ places; you just sit your arse down anywhere, the best kind I feel.

I gazed at the menu, there were not a lot of choices, but that's not necessarily bad.

The prices were a tad high but seeing as our other choices of eating was to join the local cows in the field chewing grass we had little in terms of options.

Hive account@bingbabe went for the only rice-based dish being the Sweet Potato Curry at £8.50. That sounded insanely boring to me, but who am I to decide for her?

It was Chicken in a Basket & Fries at £8.99 for me, but wait a minute…, ‘fries?’.. we are in England right. We don't say fries here, its chips godammit!

You do need to get your own cutlery at the Lanercost Tea Room and I noticed a decent selection of cakes and whatnot while wondering close to the front counter.

…they do Afternoon Tea here, this is ohhhhhh, so English but essential a sandwich, some cakes and hot tea for the equivalent of $15’…

Our food was delivered promptly but it all started going downhill from this point.

My fries actually were 'fries' and looked great. Clean, crisp and fresh I thought but after a few bites, I started to get bored.

This very occasionally happens with food. It gives you that great first impression, but then reality sets in and the initial taste mutates to something like cardboard followed by your jaws seizing up.

Maybe some salt would have helped, but I couldn’t find any. The chicken was minimal in volume, a little overcooked and equally tasteless.

Twenty minutes later I managed to finish it off, though it was hard work and my jaws ached under the strain.

Hive account@bingbabe was having little success with the Sweet Potato Curry slating it to be tasteless and needing some flavouring to be added. She stopped short at my suggestion of pouring some Monosodium Glutamate power over it.

I can be helpful sometimes, just call me under-appreciated.

We paid up and left a little disgruntled.

I strolled into the dog café just out of nosiness to see what it looked like. Besides being void of people, there were a lot of doggy snaps everywhere.