The “Sparta House Tea Room and Restaurant”:http://www.spartahouse.com is in a small historic hamlet south east of London Ontario. We stopped in for lunch recently after visiting the “Steed and Co Lavender Farm”:https://www.silvertraveladvisor.com/review?id=198653 just down the road and were not disappointed. The long white building has been many things over the years from a hotel to a funeral home. You can’t miss the building as it is all white, with a verandah and balcony at the front and a red telephone box. The restaurant is quite spacious inside with lots of different styles of tea pots (over 350 from all over the world) decorating shelves along the walls and beams across the ceiling. It didn’t look like there was a table for the four of us but we were guided into what was termed “the man cave” which is a room to the right and decorated with Beatles memorabilia. The owners, Ken and Norma Roberts, hail from Liverpool and opened up the restaurant in 1996. Based on what we saw they have a very busy trade.
The menu is decidedly British. Two of us opted for Cornish pasties with salads and two of us chose the steak and kidney pie and salad. The pasties are not as large as you would get in Cornwall but the food was delicious and the servings were just the right size to enable us to partake in dessert as well. The lemon meringue pie was light and not sweet. The apple pie and pecan pie also went down a treat. All the desserts were served with fresh whipped cream. The food is all homemade and it shows. On Sundays they serve roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with all the trimmings.
As it is a tea room, Sparta House is open 11-4 every day.
Reservations (519 775 2313) are required if you want to go there for a traditional high tea ($22.50 per person) as they need at least a day’s notice. They also offer high tea with a 15 minute tarot reading ($40 per person) from The Witch Down the Road.
