We know our bread, and our eggs, and our sausages, and our bacon, and our apple juice, etc.

It’s the little differences around the hotel that make the bigger differences to our guests (so they keep telling us).

We’ve spent a long time, fine tuning virtually every aspect of our business, carefully selecting individual suppliers because they can offer the best for us, for a wide variety of reasons (and typically they’re not the cheapest either).

Our Bread

For example, our bread, is baked for us, to order, overnight, by a small independent bakery just a few minutes’ walk from the hotel (Ridgeway Bakery).  These are one of the VERY few bakeries that still make bread the traditional way (not just by adding water to a premade mix).

We then slice each loaf ourselves by hand, beacuse we believe the perfect slice for your breakfast is 15mm thick (most ‘extra thick sliced’ bread is just 10mm thick!).

We even have the bread made as a ‘sandwich loaf’ so it fits on your plate better, and tends to have a slightly softer crust which is better for toasting.

Did you know our average demand ratio for brown: white bread at the hotel is around 3:1!?

Our Eggs

We use a local farm (Collary Farm), who are a family run farm, producing only free range eggs (they actually teach their hens to lay the eggs in the barn, to make the collection by hand three times a day just that little bit easier).

These are delivered the day after they’ve been laid, to ensure freshness.

Our Meat

All of the meat for our breakfasts, is again sourced from a very local butchers (Morgans of Farnham).

The bacon is ‘smoked back bacon’, which again, even though it costs a little more than we can buy it from wholesalers, each slice is a leaner quality of meat, and consistently tastes great.

We tried a wide variety of cooking methods to get what our guests tell us is the best bacon they’ve had, and after a great deal of research, we settled on a commercial ‘contact grill’ set to 180 degress C (essentially a commercial version of a George Foreman grill).  This method, temperature and equipment, seals in the flavour, slightly crisps the outside of the bacon, leaves the middle of the thickness softer, and crisps up the white fat nicely.  Adding a little more time (cooked by sight) enables us to finish the bacon to our guests’ particular preference.  The grill is set on a shallow incline to also drain away any excess fat released during the cooking process, with the grill very lightly seasoned with a hand pumped aerosol of olive oil first, to minimise any sticking of the bacon to the cast iron cooking ridges).

Our sausages are also made especially for us, by our local butchers. These are gluten free ‘Glamorgan’ style sausages.  Beacuse they’re made just for us, enables us to control the very simple ingredients, with also excellent quality meat.  These aren’t ‘bangers’, and are nothing like ‘butchers choice’ varieties from all the major supermarkets and wholesalers.

We very slowly cook them at the beginning of each breakfast (for around 40 minutes on a very low heat), using around a teaspoon of olive oil for 10 large sausages, in a very clean non-stick griddle pan.  Once they’ve cooled slightly, they’re then ‘butterflied’ (sliced carefully down the middle, to open up into a shape resembling butterfly wings), and then finished off for around 8 minutes on another low heat, to slightly crisp up the middle and the skin (it also often leaves a nice cross hatch patter if you turn them over).

Our Apple Juice

Even our apple juice is produced and pressed locally (in West Sussex).  Again, with no additives, artificial flavours, colours, preservatives, etc.  This is another supplier we gained from the monthly Farnham Farmers’ Market.  It’s really great juice, and can be served at room temperature (only chilled after opening).

Even our Water

We’ve done away with importing foreign bottled water.  We actually filter our water on the premises (which takes 10 hours to very slowly drip through our multistage gravity fed filter, made by Eva).  We then bottle it in sterilised HdV branded bottles, and provide it free in all our guest rooms, and in the guest fridge available 24/7.

Our breakfasts

All of these locally sourced ingredients, expertly prepared fresh to order, enable us to hold the rare title of a ‘Surrey Hills Breakfast’.  There of course other components to our breakfast that also have the same amount of practise, care, selection and detail, in how it’s sourced and made.  It’s the reasons people rarely use the condiments requested before eating (i.e. ketchup and HP sauce), why our breakfast plates are almost always returned empty, and they are some of the many reasons so many guests just keep on coming back to us again and again and again.