Secret Eater: Cream Tea

Secret Eater: Cream Tea

THE PLACE: SOURCE manager Rosie is Devon born and bred and as such likes nothing more than a cream tea. To say she’s a connoisseur is understating things dramatically. You know when people ask what food would you choose to live on for the rest of your life? She’d probably choose cream teas. With that in mind it’s a miracle that we haven’t been into a little eatery with the words ‘cream’ and ‘tea’ written onto the window sooner.

THE MEAL: Before we arrived we thought that Cream Tea was going to be a posh little tearoom but we go it a bit wrong. It’s cute but a little too crammed to be a special afternoon stop off if you can’t sit in the sun outside. Our cheese sandwich (£3.50) is lovely and has a nice Christmassy relish with tasty and not overly sharp cheese. The only shame is that it comes pre-made and wrapped in polythene. The leek soup (£3.50) is on the insipid side of subtle if we’re being kind. Better news on the huge, creamy blueberry cheesecake (£3.50), which was too big to finish. So what about the cream tea then? Well, it’s not a disaster but it’s flawed to say the least. The scone is nice, and big, so we don’t mind that there’s only one of them. However the jam is raspberry, which is virtually heresy. The default jam should be strawberry please, strawberry! And while we’re complaining would it be so hard to put the cream and jam in china pots rather than plastic takeaway pots with lids on and the date the cream goes off written on the underside. It was £4.50 after all.

THE VERDICT: There’s no getting away from it, Cream Tea is an expensive café. Slap bang in the middle of tourist central, their market possibly isn’t locals but for the money we spent we’d want everything to be tip top and, frankly, it wavered either side of average. Still, the view was great and summer should keep them busy with the city’s visitors.

WERE WE SUSSED: It was pretty busy and everyone looked rushed off their feet, and anyway all the customers had massive digital cameras in there from their sightseeing. We’d say we weren’t sussed.

Cream Tea
New Road
(01273) 677676
Mon-Fri 8am-7pm, Sat-Sun 9pm-7pm