Rabbit News (The Orangery Tea room, Ketteringham)

The Orangery Tearoom,

Ketteringham,

Open Wed-Fri 10:00-16:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00,

Highly Recommended

After returning from my latest, and rather unsuccessful, trip to the Alps in search of the best mountain top cafes, it was time to continue my winter project of getting my cafe data upto date through a full cafe cycle audit. Today's task was to go to Ketteringham Hall to check out the Orangery tea room which has replaced the Piano tearoom that used to be there.

For this particular trip I took Big George as my cycling guest. He had also been on a cycling trip last week but had stuck to the short and steep terrain of Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. As a result we were both in tip top condition (at least for old blokes) and spent most of the ride testing each other out so it was a tiring affair.

For our route I had chosen a 40 mile loop out towards Dereham before returning via Wymondham and finishing at the cafe. After we had both shared, and not listened too, each others cycling trip highlights then Big George had some sad news as one of his rabbits had  recently died. He had read that single rabbits can get lonely so had decided to get another one.

Apparently this isn't as straightforward as you think as you have to bond rabbits before they can live together. To do this the rabbits need to go to a rabbit bonder which seems to be a rabbit based residential team building course. I assume they have to undertake tasks like getting a bag of carrots across a river using only barrels, ropes and logs. 

Flopsy preparing to practice raft building

Anyway if his current rabbit (Flopsy) and new one pass the course then as a reward they get to live with Big George.

There is a long waiting list for rabbit bonders so Big George is busy teaching flopsy all he knows about making friends and influencing rabbits. Hopefully he will have two happy rabbits again soon.

With rabbit chat complete we found ourselves at Ketteringham Hall where we found the Orangery tearoom. Apart from the sign it looked very like the old Piano tearoom, which isn't a bad thing, as the outside seating area was still in action offering lovely views across the lake. The theme is still aimed at the afternoon tea brigade meaning the flowery wallpaper wasn't to Big Georges liking, maybe a more bunny theme would have been more to his liking.

Outside the Orangery Tea Room

The cake selection wasn't huge but covered all my favourites so I still gave a good effective cake selection score as I selected Bananoff cake plus fruit scones to test later in my search for fruit scone of the year (note it was a very good one and has made it into my current finalist list).

Very effective cake selection

My Hot chocolate was very hot and got better the more it cooled down. Big George thought it was a very good coffee so with the cake being a particularly good one it was high marks for the refreshments.

Todays cake and drinks

The Orangery has picked up from where the Piano tea rooms left off and therefore remains a Cake Crusader favourite and I highly recommend a visit.

From here it was just a short ride back to Crusader Towers where an afternoon kip was beckoning while Big George went home to pack Flopsy's suitcase ready for the forthcoming bonding trip.

Scores based on 2 visits

Hot Choc Quality	Guest Hot Drink Quality	Effective Cake Selection	Cake Quality	Ambiance and Atmosphere	Café Rating
7.4	7.0	7.1	8.5	8.5	7.7

Route

Click here to download 42 mile Norwich Mattishall loop gpx file to your gps