Cowdray Farm Shop and Café
Cowdray Park Midhurst West Sussex GU29 0AJ
This splendid farm shop and café, part of the 16,500-acre Cowdray Estate in Midhurst, has impeccable credentials: the café won the FARMA Best on-farm café-restaurant award in 2012, while restaurant critic Giles Coren praised the adjacent farm shop as ‘so bounteous, rare and fat as to make Waitrose in Marylebone High Street look like the Mogadishu branch of Lidl’. Both shop and café feature as much produce as possible from the estate – game, beef, lamb, and so on; even the artisan bread, baked in-house daily, uses flour milled from Cowdray wheat. The farm shop is crammed full of Sussex produce, and has a superb deli counter, featuring quiches prepared in-house from Cowdray eggs, and cheeses from Neal’s Yard Dairy and Mons – in short, all you need for a perfect picnic along the tree-fringed River Rother in nearby Midhurst, unless you’re a meat-eater of course, in which case the Cowdray Estate’s own sausages, steak and burgers served up at the café will take some serious beating.
