Owner
2009/02/15In the last 20 years The Acorn has built a fabulous reputation - people come from up to 70 miles travel, to see the beautiful Shropshire countryside, and know that there is a café serving the kind of healthy eating food they prefer as first choice.
The Acorn Café has been in the same healthy eating house for the whole of its twenty years and the café has gradually been expanded as demand has grown. It is situated in Church Stretton's main street, with an ivy covered entrance to the upstairs café. There is a tea garden in an enclosed walled garden – the sunniest and quietest tea garden around, a haven of peace, with only the birds to share your enjoyment. Inside the café caters for up to 50 people in its Acorn coffee lounge and Little Oaks dining room.
The Acorn café produces healthy eating food to recipes designed by Chris, and tested over those twenty years – but new recipes are being added continuously. All the food served is home cooked on the premises except the bread. We freshly prepare them daily from only the best local ingredients, and we use Fairtrade and organic ingredients as first choice. The Acorn has special main dishes each day, supplementing our range of freshly made soups, jacket potatoes, sandwiches, whole meal pizza's, salads and flans. These include a specialist vegetarian dish, with Chris's tasty beanie hotpot a special favourite. We use seasonal products to reflect the time of the year – and the herbs we use are grown in our tea garden.
Some people may feel The Acorn is just a vegetarian establishment, but we serve a range of meat- our hot meat pies are a much sought after delicacy - and ham. There is a range of wheat free, sugar free and gluten free food, and the café caters for vegan tastes.
The range of cakes and fruit pies are endless - Chris and her staff pick all the fruit for fruit pies, crumbles and jams locally - so our delicious scones are served with genuinely home made jam. The Acorn serves only the best ice cream, made on a Shropshire farm to the gold medal standards. We use local businesses - I passionately believe we need to keep the local economy strong, says Chris, and we are always trying new local products - recently we linked up with The Dairy House at Weobley, to include their cheeses, and a new range of seeded yoghurts, for our newly introduced healthy breakfast.
The Acorn prides itself on the quality of the food it serves - but know its also very different –and wants everyone to try healthy eating food, find that it is tasty and just as filling as traditional English cooking. Chris is clear about the direction The Acorn has to take: Over the years we have built up a superb reputation with customers who travel from all over the Midlands to savour good wholefood home cooking. Our mission is to build the business so that more people will appreciate healthy eating food as first choice. We won't compromise on the quality of our ingredients, the loving way we produce our healthy eating food. We passionately believe that healthy eating makes for a better balanced life style, we may even become trendy as years pass. When you open any magazine or paper, they extol the virtues of a healthy balanced diet, and The Acorn certainly provides that.
