food

We were tipped off by a friend that there were Japanese markets on this weekend. A mere 20 miles away is the Honda factory, and they own a lovely English country house hotel that has a japanese shop, with occasional markets, and not one but two restaurants, one doing full no-shoes-sit-on-the-ground japanese, the other with chairs, shoes and some english food (but mostly japanese).
Now those of you who know how much we love japanese will understand what a big deal this is, since we do our japanese shopping in london at the moment. So we drove through the beautiful colourful chiltons/costwolds countryside, in the lovely autumn sunshine, with the leaves just starting to really fall, and stocked up at the markets. And went to the restaurant with the chairs and bento boxes. And not only were the meals fantastic but the servings were huge. The odd thing was the number of fawlty-towers-esque english staff, but to their credit they got the order right and didn't spill anything on us. And on the way back we got to see the wonder of guy fawkes.