21/04/2026
Postcard from Wendron Pancake Barn
Hey all, It’s been a while since I wrote one of these, mainly due to how busy the Pancake Barn has got over this last year or so and allied to our busy family life with all the clubs the kids are involved in. Good issues to have of course! We do feel blessed.
Many of you are in a similar boat with kids of your own - no time to spare and all that, and it’s what makes the Pancake Barn such a joy for Kim and I to run, having such a lot in common with most of our customers, who often become our friends. If it wasn’t like that we would probably have sold the place after we got planning permission and tried something new, but the fact is we are wedded to the place, it’s growing beauty and the friends we have made here.
The new arrival is “Animal Hour with Evie” and the 3rd instalment was last Saturday. We are finding it books out really easily and is the kind of thing that makes us proud of the business and the people we have here.
Lasting 1 hour, Evie takes 8 or 9 kids into the animal enclosures, feeding the rabbits by hand with carrots, the goats, and holding the tortoise and snake whilst imparting information, hopefully in a fun way!
We’ve been wanting to do it for ages, but Evie is the first really appropriate person to take it on. She’s at College and studying to eventually become a vet. The sessions are great for the kids and great for her in terms of her CV and the necessity of her course to gain real life experience in such a setting. I hope Evie stays forever, but when she eventually leaves our own son Nicky will carry it on and he will be training with Evie on the job!
“Animal hour” is an idea that came about, much like the rest of the place, as a result of our visit to Centre Parcs many years ago. Those of you who have been to Centre Parcs may have booked your own kids on the animal and bug hunt sessions they run there, and you will certainly have noticed the other similarities between there and the Pancake Barn and its grounds etc. - I appreciate we are about a thousandth of the size, but the feeling you get there, I hope, is something we have at least to a degree replicated with the look, feel and general ethos of our own place.
If you want your child to take part in animal hour, it runs every Saturday from 10am to 11am. Your child needs to be at least 3 yrs old, maximum 12, and to book just pop in anytime and ask to book at the till point, pay your £5, pick up an information sheet and you’re in.
Coming soon will be the opening of the new toilets which are contained in the large wood cabin just outside the main restaurant, and any hospitality owner will know just how expensive and time consuming a decent set of toilets are to provide!
It has been a big task, and whilst we hesitate to call one of them a “disabled access facility” we have made one of them bigger than most with ample wheelchair access, room inside, and the toilet itself being graded for disabled use. I will be adding various helpful arm support rails in the near future too.
I know you will be wondering why we don’t just declare it a disabled facility, and it is simply because It is a complicated issue where if you ask people in general what is needed, you get huge variations of response - some think what we are doing is appropriate, whilst others think you need alarms and winches etc.
I never thought toilets could be such a huge topic but in recent years you also get into questions of gender identity, and quite often there is no one right answer in all these debates, so ultimately, we’ve done our best, and we are just gunna call them “toilets” which you can use whoever you are if you want to go to the loo!
Onto an entirely more fun subject, particularly for me; It is now spring, and as such I am very excited at all the trees and whatnot coming out into leaf and flower, and the changes the trees in particular bring to the feel of the Pancake Barn, cutting down the wind more each year, and ushering an ever growing sense of a young forest site.
Allied to this, the cricket season starts and Nicky is now 10 and playing for Cornwall with his brother hard on his heels. Next year we are going to play in the same adult team for a while which I expect might be a day where some dust blows in my eyes for a while, so these are heady times for me and my wider family.
Peggy is 3 and she is already bowling a bit in the nets trying to copy her brothers. Nicky and Henry want to play for England, but perhaps Peggy, starting so young by accident of surroundings will achieve such things. It’s spring so I daydream of this stuff, just as one day I might score a century.
I’m sorry for all of you who are going through tough financial times, only made worse since one of the worlds most palpably unqualified people got the most powerful job in the world, particularly for young families, many of whom come to the Pancake Barn.
I hope you’ve noticed the prices are low considering the sale of Pancakes has to fund the entire site, from play equipment and animals, to car parks and toilets. We keep them as low as we can whilst staying financially viable. But as an independent family owned place we will never compromise on the quality of ingredients. We make everything fresh every day, including even the granola. The pancake mix is fresh and made from scratch, the maple syrup really is from the tree and not cheap substitute. Your plate of food often contains organic produce too, grown on site with not a chemical in sight. Kim and the team really do put a lot of pride into their work and I think that ultimately the number of customers we have reflects that.
Any customer can request to see our ingredients at any time, and we will be happy to show you.
I ate at 2 different corporate chain places recently and both had clearly replaced certain foods with much lower grade alternatives that I used to enjoy.
I won’t go back to either of them unless circumstances dictate. Those choices are always a mistake and are made at board level, because saving 10p a serving might add up to a decent number with a 200 chain hospitality corporation, but it will always cost them their entire business in the end.
You should never, ever degrade the quality of food in proper restaurant hospitality. It doesn’t just end up closing the business, it also adds to poor health outcomes in the wider population, yet these kind of poor choices are made everywhere, from corporate chains to governments which have conspired to provide some of the most unhealthy kids school lunches anywhere in the world. I saw a programme on this subject recently and some of the beautiful and healthy options in various European countries and beyond puts us to shame.
You might think some of these comments are contradictory when we run a Pancake Barn, but actually the majority of meals we sell are full of nothing but good stuff, freshly made from real unprocessed ingredients.
I regularly eat a berry crepe with warm orange juice and maple syrup. Ingredients; a mix of berries, whole orange juice, maple syrup (tree sap), pancake batter made of milk, free range eggs, flour. Like I say, many of our pancakes are similar to that and are very healthy for you and minimally processed. There are the sweet tooth exceptions of course, but there’s no deception like there is on the packets you get in the shops.
Kim and I are very excited at the next stage of the Pancake Barn now the entire project is starting to be concluded in terms of the original set of goals we had. The issues we are now remedying are becoming ever smaller and I am excited to see just how good we can become in these next few years. I hope you continue to come along on the journey……Take care all of you. Ben.
