Charlbury Deli & Cafe

Emergency arrangements

March 8, 2021

Even though the government has relaxed emergency legislation, we’re still keeping our limit of one customer n the shop at a time, with one waiting in our upper room.

We’ve had to suspend serving food or drink to consume in the Deli, and even in our walled garden and on tables in Market St. We’re assuming that by April 12 it’ll be safer to allow some cafe sales, and we’re currently agreeing with West Oxfordshire District Council where to put our Market St tables and chairs.

We’re still selling the best coffee in the Cotswolds to take away, but please don’t bring recyclable cups yet, because we can’t fill them.

In the meantime we’ll still be offering phone ordering, home deliveries, payments on account and prebooked personal shopping slots after other customers have gone home.

Many Charlburians want to get out more – but many others are still self-isolating, and want the Cotswolds’ best coffee, bread, milk and fruit & veg to help them keep well and safe.

We’ll try to announce changes here, to customers on our newsletter list and on the Charlbury town website.

We’re currently open from 8.30 to 2 pm, Monday to Saturday.

We’re currently selling our customers far more groceries than we were before the virus struck.  More and more people have been depending on us for food that bigger shops haven’t been able to sell, for better food and for more attentive service.

If just one Covid case were traced back to a contact someone had made in the Deli, we’d have to send staff home. If that happened, we haven’t got enough people trained and able to circulate to keep the shop open.

Mercifully, our customers’ loyalty and taxpayers’ generosity since Lockdown make us financially healthy enough not to be desperate for the business a full cafe re-opening might give us.

So right now, we’re changing almost nothing about the way we’ve been running the Deli. We’ll still sell the best range of groceries for miles around.

We’ll be reviewing this every week, and at some point we’ll certainly become Charlbury’s buzzing  hub again. But we don’t think now is quite the time.

We want to keep seeing our loyal customers and the new visitors  Charlbury’s been attracting. We’d rather not risk being forced to close

Our bread and cakes: made locally

We’re almost as famous for Lynne’s home-made cakes as for the best coffee in the Cotswolds.

For many of our customers, though, our sourdough bread from Mark’s Cotswold Bakery is beginning to rival Lynne’s cakes. His fruitloaf (at present: weekends only) is fast catching up with his sourdough as well.

Charlbury Deli: the food shop determined to stay in our town centre

The Charlbury Deli used to be one of half a dozen food shops along the two streets – Sheep St and Market St – that, in 1990, were really Charlbury’s High Street.

In those days, there were 40-odd shops: from sweet shops to butchers. But in 1990, the food shops sold only cans and packets. Not what you’d call Good Food.

So about 60 Charlburians clubbed together, made themselves into a limited company, bought a shop no-one wanted and called it the Good Food Shop .

A few years later, there were fewer stores along the two streets, and a pretty decent, larger, Co-op on the edge of the town. So they changed the name to the Charlbury Deli & Cafe to give customers a reason for coming from the Co-op.

By 2017, the Co-op and nine other major grocery chains had hoovered up almost all the Charlbury food business. So 60 more shareholders helped finance the move to a far more prominent site on Market St.

There we sell the best coffee in the Cotswolds – brewed in Charlbury from beans roasted by Oxford’s Missing Bean, who help train our staff.

In normal times, we sell it in a lovely cafe. But right now, we’ve had to suspend its indoor operations. We’ll happily make you a cup though – or a cup of our tea – as long as you drink it somewhere else. Or you can try one of our cool milkshakes – usually made from local cows milked that morning

We also sell the best home-baked cakes in the Cotswolds: most mornings, our shop manager, Lynne Stubbles, is up at 4.30 baking cakes. Like the team at our main sourdough bread supplier, Mark’s Cotswold Bakery, just outside Chipping Norton.

Overall, about 80% of what we sell comes from Oxfordshire suppliers: we’re fortunate to have some fabulous local food manufacturers on our doorstep. British isn’t always best of course:  Missing Bean offers a choice of origins for its bags of coffee,  Standlake’s Oxford Wine Co travels the globe to choose really distinctive wine, and our neighbours swear by our delicious loose Belgian chocolates.

The Deli’s now owned by about 120 local shareholders. To learn more about how our shareholders have been an important part of our development programme, there’ll soon be a shareholder section.

We’re determined to stay here. Whatever we call our streets, we’ll keep a food shop in the main one.

If you want to find where and when we’re open, go to  our Visit Us page 

But if you’re local and supply good food or drink you’d like to sell us , just email us here.

We can’t promise we’ll be able to do business with you. But we’d be disappointed if we couldn’t.