Perrywood Coffee Shop and Restaurant — Restaurant in Colchester

If you ever find yourself at Perrywood Garden Centre and think, “Oh, I’ll just pop into the café for a quick bite”—brace yourself. It’s less ‘pop’ and more ‘prepare for takeoff’ with the long queues that greet you. The setup is rather canteen-like: drinks and hot food on one side, then another queue for cakes. Yes, it’s a two-stop journey before you even find your seat! You’ll need some first-class queuing patience for this one.

Now, onto the food: it’s fine, but for the prices, you’d hope for something a little more gourmet. £70 for three people is steep for what we had—three soft drinks, two salads, a panini with chips, and three slices of cake. And while the cakes are fairly priced, they’re not exactly flying high in the flavour department. But hey, they weren’t bad enough to ground our experience completely.

What’s saving grace here is the garden centre itself, which is, quite frankly, excellent. It’s like a glorious first-class cabin of plants, so I get why people flock to the café. If it wasn’t attached to such an amazing destination, though, I’m not sure the café alone would have the same pull. Still, I’d go again—because, let’s face it, the plants are worth the visit, and if you’re already there, might as well refuel.

In summary: not bad, but not quite the high-flying experience one might hope for. Keep your expectations grounded, and you’ll...

So, so appalling and dangerous too. I went to buy plants, but came away with concussion and whiplash instead. I was outside at the cafe when one of their sun parasols fell over and the metal pole hit me on the side of the head. The response of the cafe manager was so unbelievably dangerous and inept. She behaved as if it was nothing at all. Even though she was meant to be a first aider, she clearly knew nothing about the dangers of head injuries: that the consequences often show up after the event. Instead she treated me like a difficult customer. They did nothing to address what had happened. I didn't even get a refund and despite having a head injury, I had to drive myself home!! I spent the following evening in A&E after deteriorating. The doctors diagnosed concussion and a whiplash injury that will take many weeks at least to recover from. When I emailed a complaint, I got the same pathetic response from a manager. They didn't care in the slightest that a customer had got a head injury in their cafe. Their attitude was 'we've decided our response was absolutely fine, and we hope to see you at Perrywoods again soon'!!! If you value your health and safety, stay away from...

If you ever wanna come to the Perrywood Garden Centre and feeling hungry and want to have a light lunch or a quick bite, you either come here extremely early around 10:30 or brace yourself with a long journey of big impact for extremely long queues of over 20 minutes wait to order food and having a hard time finding a free table and hopefully the last customers that were using it didn’t make a mess during eating. On to the foods in general is really delicious for these kind of garden restaurants, we had 2 Bacon and Mushroom Quiche, a Fish & Chips and sweet potato fries with 3 drinks.If this is your first time going to eat here and don’t want to have a bad experience that the food tastes bad, I would recommend you to order the quiche, I’ve been there 3 times and I promise it won’t disappoint you. Overall Is a fairly good experience to have a light lunch as long you have the time to try it or if you want to try to avoid long queues here you can try the Greenhouse Cafe at the other side of the...