I reckon you can divide cafes into two groups: those that are run by people who love food, and those that are run by people who want to make a living and can see that people require lunch and snacks. And there are definitely some key indicators you can use to identify which group a café falls into. It’s nothing as obvious as “the food is better”. Here’s my ready reckoner to help identify when you’re in a café that doesn’t give a stuff about food:

1. Apple juice. If it looks and smells like cat wee, and was obviously pressed out of concentrate from the EU apple mountain and sold in a cash and carry, you know they don’t care.
2. Pepper. When you have a little pot of sneeze-powder on your table, and nothing to get freshly ground black pepper out of
3. SOS salad with everything. Same Old Stuff salad; lettuce, red & green pepper, tomato, cucumber. Usually with gloopy vinaigrette.
4. Squirty cream. The only valid use of squirty cream is sexy bedroom hijinks. Put it anywhere near food and you’re in my bad books.

See? It’s all about basic choices, not the quality of the cooking itself. That said, in general terms you’d be lucky to get really good food at café that doesn’t care, and you can count yourself unlucky to be served rubbish by one that does.

In Ludlow I’d definitely put Aragon’s in the don’t-care category. The cat-pee apple juice was our first clue. My pot of tea was weak as dishwater and tasted like it. And Maureen’s panini came with prime SOS salad. So it was no real surprise that the steak in her panini was over-cooked and the filling generally niggardly and unbalanced. I had the Sunday roast; the beef was cooked to a uniform allotment-dirt brown and it was served with serially over-boiled vegetables. You’ve got to boil fairly vigorously to get round carrot slices floppy. Almost criminally, the beef was actually of very good quality and likely from a local butcher.

Which brings me to the “local produce” label. These days that label is about the easiest thing to stick on a sign or a menu and imply that you love food and care about what you’re serving. But it don’t mean beans, so don’t trust it.

I ought to feel guilty about giving Aragon’s such a slating when our lunch was at least essentially edible and didn’t cost the earth. But I don’t. Not when there are two other cafes in Ludlow that I can name without blinking (Green Café, French Pantry) who serve lunches in exactly the same price range that are immeasurably better. And they stock proper apple juice and even make a decent cup of tea.

So come on Aragon’s, up your game. You can actually save a bit of money by taking the roast out of the oven a bit earlier and halving the time you spend tormenting your veggies. Unfortunately, you’re nicely situated right on the main square of a popular little tourist town and I suspect you don’t really care.

UPDATE: check out the comments – more people have written to defend Aragon’s than any other review on my blog, so I may very well have had an unlucky visit. Give ’em a try! If nothing else they’re a local independent restaurant in a small town.