Junge, die Bäckerei – an unusual cludgie

We recently spent time in northern Germany and Poland, and so the next few postings will be recording cludgies from our travels.

The first is unusual only in that it is so very different to cludgies in similar locations in Scotland – because this one was essentially a motorway service station. It was the Pommerndreieck branch of the Junge bakery chain just off the A20 – Junge are present in towns and cities across northern Germany, and are pretty good. This particular branch happens to be near a branch of an American bad food outlet (that one with the Scottish name and the yellow M logo), and you’d want to go straight past that to the Junge bakery on the right!

The cludgie was clean, elegant, and normally unremarkable… but not at all what motorway service stations are like in Scotland, so worthy of a mention here.

Clean and functional…

… as all public cludgies should be, as a minimum

Good Craic Café, Inverness

This is a nice café in the centre of Inverness, with good coffee, interesting art on the walls, and friendly staff. The cludgies were decent, with nice tiles on the back wall.

Subtle grey tones for the cludgie.

The lobby area for the cludgies – take care not to go through the other door from the café, or you’ll be in the kitchen, expected to help the washing up!

The Scottish Deli, Dunkeld

Dunkeld is not a big place, and we have posted another entry from the town…but we can report on another delightful cludgie, this time at The Scottish Deli, after we stopped off for lunch there.

The door – for reasons we didn’t enquire about – has a collection of “Simon’s cheesy jokes” that are exactly what they sound like:

– Which genre of music appeals to most cheeses? R ‘n’ Brie!
– Why did the Swiss cheese go to church every day? Because it was very holey!

We didn’t ask who Simon was. We hope his taste in cheeses is better than his taste in jokes!

Lots of Simon’s dodgy jokes!

But what is the cludgie like, after you’ve spent time looking at the door?

The first thing you see is a riot of colourful tiles behind the cludgie and the sink (and yes, in the mirror there is a baby-changing table visible).

Then there is a selection of wonky photographs of staff, surrounding a photo of eggs in a basket (no, we don’t know what that’s about either).

Below the pictures is the most unusual toilet-roll holder we’ve ever seen (we presume the “please do not touch” refers to the switch for the boiler, not the paper).

Finally, on turning around again, the door is a colourful combination of fruit, vegetables and cheeses – all sold at the deli counter, of course.

It’s quite astonishing that in one of the smallest cludgies we’ve been in, there’s so much to see! But go see for yourself, if you’re ever in Dunkeld (and the light lunches are pretty good, so no reason not to go!).