If you plan visiting the Glebe Gardens' Cafe, make sure to make a day of it. There is so much more here than just the food.
But the food! This is wonderful cooking, from their sausage pies, their jumbo sandwiches made with doorsteps of homemade bread, served with a bowl of soup made from what's fresh in the garden. Their fine quiches, fishy daily specials, and plays on their seasonal produce – minted pea bruchetta with Toonsbridge buffalo mozzarella, gorgeous salads made with their own salad greens, and often their special heritage tomatoes. Then, we move on to the desserts, astonishingly divine cakes with their extraordinary lemon meringue cake as the most complex and sensational creation that would impress even the most highly trained patissier. This is wonderful cooking.
And there's more. The cafe itself sits part indoors, part outdoors, under an enormous sail, surrounded by courtyard walls of slate-coloured stone, and the most gorgeous pot plants of every colour. Then to the seaside gardens, where chickens cluck, goat's bleet, bees buzz, butterflies fly and birds sing (tame greedy robins come to your table while you lunch). There are wild areas with orchids and grasses, a river with a romantic bridge, as well as structured areas with ordered vegetables, flowerbeds, and quiet sheltered sun spots where benches are placed in just the right place.
Glebe is a little bit of heaven in West Cork, calming the soul and lifting the spirit.
A Day at Glebe Gardens, Baltimore
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