The menu choice immense; the specials board alone has more choice than most other places. No eggs are used at all - everything is vegetarian and the majority vegan (or vegan option).
Having been 6 times in the past couple of years I've held off blogging about it. Whilst the food has been consistantly good, there was until our last visit a fairly fundamental problem. Now that this appears to have been addressed; I'm happy to recommend it to others.
I don't buy into the whole concept that orders must arrive within 15 minutes, and don't mind waiting half an hour for good food. At the Arts Cafe however the wait was more a "enough time to go to the supermarket and buy the ingredients before cooking" wait. It happened every time we went - the longest being over 2 hours from ordering.
Ideally restaurants do 90% of the prep before they open; finishing off dishes when they're ordered. Here however each seemed to be made from scratch. As most were complex and had lots going on; if 4 people ordered different things there'd simply be too much work for one person to do.
Last time though we were pleased to see the owner out of the kitchen in incharge of front of house. The choice is still huge, but waiting times down to normal.
I can't remember exactly what we had, but I took a few snaps as usual of our shared starter and one of the mains:
The portion sizes are pretty generous and all food is very fresh. Flavours are good in most dishes and many come with lovely creamy sauces. I've had their burger a couple of times but probably wouldn't have again (the second time I forgot that I'd had it before!).I've not been so impressed by their desserts - something described as rocky road was not at all to my taste. We did get a pretty decent sticky toffee pudding last time however:
I'm really pleased to see that they've sorted the waiting issue now and will certainly return when next down that way (normally a couple of times a year). It's probably in my top 10 favourite places in the UK.
