Laporte’s

Love this place. Bags of character and delicious food. Best place to go for a lazy Saturday lunch. You always feel just that little bit better after a meal at Laporte’s.

What a fantastic find in Lewes, just 2 minutes walk up the hill from the station. Organic and substantially gluten-​free menu offering breakfasty, lunchy and salady things. Had bubble-​n-​sqeak with 2 poached eggs, eaten in the walled garden at the back. Friendly service, attention to detail and excellent nosh. All ’round recommended.

We stopped in for breakfast on our way to the train station, and this place is great! It’s got a nice, unpretentious feel to it, with a main room full of light and a patio open if you’re interested in sitting outside. The menu was easy and adaptable, as we’re a vegetarian and a celiac vegan:) The service was good and fast, the prices reasonable and the bathroom was kind of adorable. We’ll definitely be back when we’re in town!

Laporte’s is obviously a very ‘local’ place; whenever I go in there the people in there all seem to know each other and be talking about Local Issues. It’s a pleasant enough café to sit in, although to be honest there is so much competition of places doing tea and cake and sandwiches in the Lewes area, Laporte’s doesn’t tend to entice me in. The only hot food that they do is soup, which wouldn’t necessarily be something to hold against them, except that the one time I tried it it was a watery beetroot soup and wasn’t very good. Plus I don’t think their cake is anything particularly special. My boss is a big fan of their chocolate cake but the lemon drizzle cake I had was rather soggy. These factors combined with the feeling of being a total foreigner that I get whenever I go in are enough to send me up the hill to the patisserie, or to the Buttercup Café at the end of town. They also have another shop a couple of doors up which used to be a grocery store. The groceries have now been consolidated into the café, and the other shop now sell interiors.

The first thing to mention is the venue itself; the building looks like somebody has sliced it down the middle, leaving triangular leftovers behind. While that might sound both traumatic and unattractive, it is actually both stylish and a bit artistic.
The best aspect of this little café is the peaceful location that allows you to stare out of the large windows and look upon on the very attractive town that is Lewes.
The products here are all what you’d expect, all offered a competitive price and to a good quality.

I love the building that Laporte’s lives in! It’s a fantastic old cottage that is incredibly narrow and angular and that has been preserved and adapted into a series of three shops– a sandwich shop, Laporte’s, a barbers and a little grocers. I love sitting in Laporte’s and imagining who might have lived here way back and what it must have looked like. Now the tail end of it is a very dinky bright sandwich shop. When I first went in it was under duress with a friend– I loved the way it looked but I was sceptical, thinking that it looked too lovely and posh to serve anything but tiny cakes and tiny sandwiches. She wanted to sit in the sunny window though, so she won. I was wrong! We ordered sussex cheddar sandwiches with homemade chutney and they broughtout lovely doorstep sandwiches with fantastic wholemeal bread, strong tangy cheddar and sweet oniony chutney. Fabulous. The coffee was really nice as well, and served in generous mugs. The prices were better thsn expected– 3.50 for a sandwich and 2 pounds for coffee. It really was a lovely place to sit too, it will be nice to go back in the summer and sit at their little outside tables.