Royal Lion

The Royal Lion is a hotel on Broad Street in Lyme Regis, possibly the last of what was a number of such. A place with many attractions, including, for example, enough car parking spaces out back as when building new accommodation sheds in their yard, after the way of most such hotels, they left enough space for cars. Including also a galvanised steel shoe cleaning grill for placement outside a back door, for the use of people who might have dirty shoes or boots on. Unlike the people who used the front door.

The very same grill as we had outside our back door when I was a child, and is now preserved in our garage, it taking around 30 seconds to run it down.

However, while they could manage a modest amount of a quite decent Calvados, sausage sandwich for breakfast was too much for them. What I asked for was a sausage sandwich on white bread, not toasted. What I got was a sausage toastie. That is to say two or three herbal sausages, sliced length wise, encased in heavily margarine'd toast, toast from which the crusts had been removed. And a sprig of pea foliage had been added for garnish. The chef could not resist his urge, perhaps born of excess consumption of cooking programmes on afternoon television, to fancy things up a bit. Not very nice at all, but I didn't have the heart to complain; they had tried after all.

It is a source of continuing irritation that, despite all those cooking programmes, so few hotels and restaurants seem to be able to manage proper bread - and, generally speaking, the places that go in for DIY are not much better: all fancy (to match their prices) and often undercooked. Once upon a time, for example, one could rely on hotels serving quite decent white rolls as an adjunct to meals. Now you are lucky if there is a supply of sliced white bread with which to make your own toast - which at least has the advantage of being fresh, another commodity in short supply in the toast department. Although, to be fair to the Royal Lion, their toast, not DIY, was both warm and fresh.

Two honourable exceptions, Terroirs still does decent bread and Estrela used to. The latter having fallen off a bit under new management.

Reference 1: https://www.terroirswinebar.com/.

Reference 2: http://www.estrelabar.com/.