Lunch in St. Andrews

Yesterday, David and I walked into town for lunch at one of the student spots that we have been reading about in the various guides that we found in the house. The St. Andrews students are still “on holiday” so the town is a bit quieter than normal, and we decided to take the chance to enjoy lunch in one of the tiny, tiny sandwich shops when they weren’t packed elbow-to-elbow with students. We chose Cherries on South Street, which is one of the larger ones as it actually has two tables inside, and each table has four seats. There’s also a strip of cork mounted about table-height in front of the window that can serve as another table in a pinch, and that’s where we sat.

There was a queue of customers out the door the whole time we were there, and most of them were holding big wicker baskets full of drinks and disposable silverware, so I assumed they were probably the unlucky mates who drew sandwich-gathering duty for their office that day. The sandwiches at Cherries are excellent, and it looks as if the word has gotten out. There’s a big board on the wall that lists all the things you can put in a sandwich, and though I was prepared for some strange combinations (given the ubiquitousness of the baked potato topped with tuna and corn here…), most of the sandwiches sounded quite good. There was the turkey with cranberries and brie cheese, the ham with Swiss and chutney, the smoked salmon with capers and cream cheese…all quite straightforward and yummy sounding. I chose a less yummy sounding prawn, avocado and rocket (shrimp with avocado and arugula) baguette. The sandwich maker thankfully asked if I wanted butter on the bread before he started, so I had a chance to say no, as most sandwiches in the UK just come standard with a healthy spread of butter and thick slices of cucumber. David fared less well in the sandwich-ordering process, and ended up with chunks of ham, grated cheese and dried apricots between two slices of bread. But…no butter! We took a pass on the Irn Bru, but did pick out a bag of crisps to share and went with the Honey Roast Ham and Cranberry flavor (among our other options were Ludlow Sausage, Beef and Horseradish, or Turkey and Chestnut Stuffing…essentially a Thanksgiving dinner wrapped up in a foil bag!)

After lunch, we took a walk through town and stopped in a few of the charity shops that are everywhere in town. Most of them are filled with glassware, men’s shoes and cassette tapes of REO Speedwagon…things you would find in your parents’ basements. They are definitely worth a stop, however, because there is the treasure-hunt aspect to them—the possibility that you’ll find something you never really knew you needed for an incredibly small amount of money. I ended up with a necklace for £2 and David bought a kids DVD that won’t play on any DVD machines except those sold in the UK (and our house has only a VCR player, by the way...). We also went into a fabulous shop that pledges to outfit you in head-to-toe lightweight, packable, waterproof yet breathable, hi-tech syntheticwear…I’m not kidding when I say their slogan is actually something like, “Technology masquerading as clothing.” No mention of the flammability rating anywhere in the store, however.

Finally we ended up in possibly the world’s most fabulous housewares store. Most of its fabulousness, of course, was related to its Britishness. If you can only say one thing about these Brits, it’s this: they really do know how to go about creating a good hot beverage, and they have thoroughly thought through the entire coffee and tea-making process to enhance it with various fabulous products at every step. There’s the electric tea kettle found in every home, school and hair salon used to almost instantly boil water (everyone knows that the water cannot be merely HEATED…the horror!), the tea balls that hold the tea at the bottom of a proper ceramic tea kettle, to which you would add the water (NEVER the other way around!), the little ceramic trivet that protects your kitchen counter from the hot tea kettle, and the padded tea cozies that go over and around the full kettle of tea once it’s made to keep it hot. And for coffee, there’s the full-size coffee press (I learned the hard way that those are NOT called French presses here…), the mini-size coffee press, the to-go-travel-mug-coffee-press. The store was filled with hot beverage making implements, and I spent about 20 minutes browsing through all of them, thinking about how ironic it was that three weeks ago when we arrived and I saw some of these things on the counter of our new kitchen, I couldn’t imagine how we were supposed to use them. And yet now I can’t imagine a proper kitchen without any of them!