The Owl Tea Rooms, Holt
Smashed avocado on sweet potato toast, with feta and toasted seeds, topped with poached eggs, sounds a thoroughly modern way to start the day.
It was wonderful too – an innovative, delicious and filling breakfast, and pretty near perfect when paired with a black coffee and an orange juice.
The Owl Tea Rooms, just off Holt Market Place, pride themselves on being the oldest tea rooms in Norfolk and it is easy to see why generations of customers have been coming back for more since 1929.
As well as serving an amazing array of home-baked cakes and cookies, sandwiches, lunches, and sweet and savoury pastries and afternoon teas, they do not rest on their laurels.
The menu is an impressive balance between innovation (yes please to biscoff ice cream sundae later in the day) and tradition (the English breakfast my husband chose.) Sausage, treacle-cured bacon, black pudding, fried egg, baked beans, mushrooms, tomatoes and toast created a very fine breakfast.
There are veggie options too including the millennial-friendly avocado and sweet potato wonder. It is billed as sweet potato ‘toast’ which turned out to be thick slices of sweet potato, baked to a nicely soft texture, and contained by the jacket skin to look remarkably like toast. Piled high with smashed avocado and topped with perfectly poached eggs, the yielding creamy flavours were complemented by the piquancy of feta and the crunch of seeds.
Plenty of friendly, helpful staff (happy to share the folk tale of the owls of Holt), and the choice of tables inside the historic building or in its pretty courtyard, completed an excellent breakfast, which was so satisfying it took us right through to our evening meal – although I would have been unable to resist one of the enormous list of cakes if we’d been nearby later in the day (basically all the cakes I could think of, plus many more fabulous combinations of flavours.)
owltearooms.co.uk
Our review visits are unannounced and we pay for our own meals
