Honiton: Boston Tea Party and Combe House Hotel

12th and 13th July.Off to an advisory board in Combe House Hotel near Honiton in Devon. Dreadful drive in the monsoon.
Stopped for a very late lunch in Honiton, well past lunch time, and came across the Boston Tea Party.
http://www.bostonteaparty.co.uk/cafe/honiton
Apparently there are several branches of the same in that part of the country. Being between meals I opted for the all day breakfast, and chose Baked Eggs and Chorizo Sausage. This is a dish of local chorizo, potato, an egg and yoghourt  with some bread:

I have to say this was a superlative dish, and I thoroughly recommend it. It also scored a 9.5 on the CHOF scale, with 10 being too hot to eat. (The yoghourt cooled it a little) Have a look at their menu. Pity there are none in London, but they depend on local produce.
Then on to the Combe House Hotel. This is a country house hotel in the middle of nowhere with 15 rooms and excellent food and staff. Our dinner organised by the facilitator was a buffet served in the Georgian Kitchen and taken into an informal area in the bar.

There was a choice of dishes, and I opted for beef:

You may detect the steam coming off the beef, but once I had taken my plate back to a table and sorted myself out, it had lost some of its CHOF points. This is a perennial problem with buffet food, and there is rarely an establishment that can figure out a way of serving any kind of buffet food really hot. However, the quality was excellent. I went back for a second helping, and had a salmon en croute which looked very attractive, but the loss of temperature, and it somewhat uberfishy taste left me a little underwhelmed.

Breakfast was excellent, and alongside an excellent fresh food salad with yoghourt, I also tried the scrambled egg with smoked salmon, which I rated highly.
The highlight was lunch, and I chose guinea fowl. This was truly excellent and scored highly on every count. Well cooked and presented, tasty and hot. Prior to that was an amuse bouche combination of smoked salmon with salmon caviar served on spoons that looked as if Uri Geller had been a guest in the hotel recently and a sort of black biscuit (?olive) with goats' cheese.

This was followed by some excellent local cheeses. The hotel uses a lot of local produce and the quality of all the food served was excellent.

I would recommend anyone to stay at this hotel, but in the rain, there is not a lot to do, and it is a short drive back to Honiton. Not a townie's hotel. Quite expensive. Check out the booking sites. Much fuss made of Arab Stallions in neighbouring fields. Not being a horsey person, this went straight over my head, but many thought otherwise. It must be the sort of thing that interests country folk. The food was great and the rooms comfortable if a little rustic.