We have a new shop in town. Old friends will remember Al’s fruit and veg shop, which he sold a few years ago to an employee. I’ll call him Dave, because most of my friends are called Dave, but that’s not actually his name. Dave worked very hard to make a go of it and succeeded for quite some time, but being the sole owner of a small shop is hard work and there’s not a lot of profit in greengrocery, it’s all about the turnover and, after a few years, he closed it and turned it into a general antique/second-hand shop instead. And then it closed altogether – I missed out on that happening and have lost touch, which is a shame as I liked him and certainly wish him well.
Anyway, workmen have been in and scaffolding has been up and they’ve got a Facebook page and we all watched developments, and it’s now a small but high quality coffee house and bakery. This was the first week of trading, so LT and I went in to buy our bread this morning. And we bought a couple of little lamb samosas and a big sausage roll for lunch too.
It’s intriguing to me, how they’ve changed the shop – they’ve taken out the back wall to the passageway and stairs, so that they can put tables and chairs upstairs. A bit surprisingly, they’ve installed an Aga – not yet sure what it’s for, actually and it’ll be really hot in summer. The samosas were delicious, really excellent and the sausage roll was perfectly good, though not actually exceptional. We’ll try the bread in the morning and have our eye on the baguettes and croissants. I hope they can make a go of it – if there’s one thing that Yagnub is well served for, it’s cafés, but this one is a bit different and there is a place for a fine bakery, so fingers crossed for the bread quality. Also that their fairly high prices are matched by quality so that people keep shopping there.
It’s a bit of a foodie spot at present, is Yagnub. All very close to each other, we have a good fishmonger, deli, wholefood shop and greengrocer, as well as the two good butchers and various other independent shops – there’s a decent everyday bakery, two sweetshops that have proper jars and will weigh out your 100g (not quite as satisfying as a quarter, has to be said) of mint imperials or aniseed balls or whatever old-fashioned sweets take your fancy – and there are several good places to eat; at lunchtime anyway, the choice is smaller in the evening.
We had rashers of our latest batch of bacon, with new-laid eggs and fried bread (I know, darlings, how retro!) for dinner last night. We’re ruined for ordinary bacon. Don’t want to have to buy it again. And not a drop of liquid comes out, especially not that nasty white scummy stuff that means that a lot of water has been injected in the meat. Even dry-cured bacon has it. So the bacon may be dry-cured but the pork has had salty water added to it.