This afternoon Jayne brought to my attention the website lovebeanbuffet.com.

Crawley locals may well be familiar with the Love Bean cafe in the town centre, especially if they are anything to do with the council. It is the nearest food place to the Town Hall and so is almost the staff canteen for the place. Jayne works around the corner and so often stops there for lunch or a coffee, and sometimes I will join her if I am in town. It is a friendly independent place and the food is great, but I was never aware that the lady who runs it also does catering for parties and events.

I knew that the cafe has provided food for council events at times, but thought that was just because of proximity and was part of the normal cafe activities.

Given my current state of not being able to eat lots of things easily it was a bit cruel for Jayne to send me a link to a website full of mouth-watering photos of food, but I am glad she did. I am not in a position to procure catering at the moment, but I was I would certainly be considering this and so if anybody has an SME and needs some catering for a meeting, or needs food for a party make a note of the address and have a look. If you really fancy something that isn’t listed you can ask about it and there is a fair chance they will be able to make it and provide it for you.

I don’t have any connection to the company, apart from being a satisfied customer of the cafe, but I do like to see small independent local companies getting the promotion they deserve, and to keep the supply chain as local as possible. Talking of which, Love Bean seems to have the same philosphy as they source all their bread from a local independent bakery rather than some conglomerate.

Of course there are other good local catering firms like Charlie’s Deli in Manor Royal and the Tilgate Bakery so we are spoilt for choice. Adding the Love Bean Buffet to the list just means that we are even more spoilt for choice than I realised!

As I said, I am not in the market for any catering just at the moment, but if anybody does use Love Bean I would be interested to hear how you get on.