PRICE:
Frommer's Highly Recommended

A stone's throw from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, this cafe-bistro is housed in a building dating from 1547 (and with connections to Lewis Carroll). For a quick, light meal or pretheater dinner, it's ideal. The menu changes monthly. Begin with such starters as an English muffin with smoked haddock and creamed leeks, or else Serrano ham with fresh figs and a basil salad. Then you can tuck into such mains as filet of Scottish beef with portobello mushrooms or else rack of Cornish lamb with dauphinoise potatoes, perhaps roast Gressingham duck with Puy lentils. For dessert, why not the dark-chocolate truffle cake with white-chocolate ice cream? Look to the blackboard for daily specials. The chef takes chances (no doubt inspired by trips to the Continent), and it's a nice departure from the bland tearoom food served for decades in Stratford.

Copyright: Excerpted from Frommer's England 2009, (c) 2008, Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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