The obvious thing to say about themed restaurants is that they are usually bad. The Rainforest Café in London, for instance, was nothing like a rainforest, though it is slightly more like a rainforest now it has gone. But there are exceptions. The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop in Bakewell, Derbyshire, for instance. Perhaps the sort of tourists who go to Bakewell for tarts are more dangerous than the ones who go to Bath for buns. They certainly look as if they read a lot of crime fiction and are capable of murder in their heads. But The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop out-gilds its myth. It’s rare.
The menu is epic, and lovely, and I mention only a few to make you drool
In the history of the human’s relationship to its mouth, the Bakewell pudding, which is earlier than the tart, being Regency, is just another happy error. Like setting cows on fire. It is jam and almond egg custard on puff pastry, and it was born by mistake. The canonical line is that a local cook tried to bake a jam tart but spread the egg on top, rather than stirring it in, and hello custard. What took you so long? Although this is mildly disputed – people just don’t get as angry about the provenance of Bakewell pudding as they do about tiramisu, but we are not Italian – you wouldn’t say so in Bakewell, which is as certain a town as exists in the British Isles; if you are having an existential crisis there are worse places to recover. The tart – jam and almond sponge on shortcrust pastry with fondant icing and a cherry – is Mitford era, not that they ate much, and, if you are the sort of person who wishes to celebrate Bakewell Tart Day, it’s on Wednesday.
The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop is 17th century: that is, it looks like a pub in a Mormon re-enactment of an old English village. The ground floor is the kind of bakery every town used to have – heaven for the eyes, nose, and mouth – now replaced by Greggs. I won’t blame Russian black ops for Greggs, though I want to, and they’ve done plenty. The restaurant is upstairs, styled as a comfortable barn: it looks like a barn, but it has a chandelier. The dominant colour is pale brown, but if you eat enough sugar it looks gold.
I know why it looks like a barn: because it is not for us. On the walls are Impressionist-style paintings of cows, rabbits, ducks and cows again. For Impressionism – indeed for cows, rabbits and ducks – they have a terrible intensity. There is a photograph of Mrs Wilson, ‘the founder of The Original Bakewell Pudding Shop’. She looks like an East End gangster, and there is nothing wrong with that.
The menu is epic, and lovely, and I mention only a few to make you drool: the Original Pudding Shop Breakfast (£13); All Things Bakewell (fruit cake, cream tea, Bakewell pudding or tart, £21.50); Hot Roast Pork Cob (sandwich, £14); Derbyshire steak & ale pie, £18.50). Usually, a menu of this size bespeaks chaos, but this is not an ordinary restaurant. We have an immense ploughman’s (cold beef and ham, a pork pie, cheddar and stilton, salad and roll, £16.25); the steak pie; a Bakewell pudding and tart (£14); a Mars Bar Crisp traybake because I am insane (£4.75). It’s hard to write about food this warm and expansive, because it is a mother’s love, and infants can’t write prose. Through ecstasy I burble: it’s perfect. Cakes of the peaks! It’s as fine a place as I have been, and there’s an ending.
The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop, The Square, Bakewell, Derbyshire, DE45 1BT; tel: 01629 812193.
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