Fifteen years ago, if you were eating at 239 Brompton Road in Kensington, just over from the Oratory, you may have been enjoying steak tartare, or grilled rabbit with mustard sauce, or tête de veau, a poached portion of calf’s head with turned potatoes. This was the former premises of Racine, a French restaurant by Henry Harris, which Michael Winner said was ‘quadruple historic’. Harris now runs Bouchon Racine in Farringdon, rated the best restaurant in the country this year, after closing the Knightsbridge site in 2015.
At 239 Brompton Road nowadays, on the menu you’ll find a ‘cheesecake brownie served with vanilla ice cream, Oreos and warm Nutella and Lotus Biscoff sauce’ (£10.95). If you’re coming in for breakfast, you can have a ‘cube croissant’ filled with Lotus Biscoff (£6.90). Wash it all down with a strawberry cheesecake matcha latte (£8.50), which is topped with Lotus Biscoff crumbs. As Henry Ford almost said, any customer can have a coffee with any flavour so long as it is Lotus Biscoff.
This is EL&N, one of the most upmarket examples of a ‘dessert café’, an increasingly common type of establishment on high streets across the country. They come in varying degrees of garishness, but they all cater for the bizarre need of someone who, at 10 p.m, wants to head out for banana chocolate French waffle toast.
Their aesthetic is maximalist: I have learned you can get indigestion from reading a menu
At 11 p.m. on a Saturday, the branches of EL&N and L’Eto opposite Harrods are only just closing. When I return the next lunchtime, it is all too much. There are more shopping bags than people, and a lady is walking in wearing a dressing gown. The clientele is one-third Muslim women; one-third knackered shoppers; one-third Asian families. There is the most terrifying matriarch I have ever seen holding court over a cake. No one is looking at anything other than their phone, because it’s better than looking at anything else. All the armchairs and the walls are off-pink, like an anaemic flamingo. Neon signs on the wall say ‘love at first bite’, a phrase typically associated with Count Dracula. I wait almost half an hour to place an order, since I am not on my phone and am staring into space: perhaps they have never seen this before and think I’m paralysed by choice, or having a transient ischemic attack. If I were, I think they would try to heal me with Lotus Biscoff before calling an ambulance.
If EL&N is the Simpson’s in the Strand of dessert cafés, then Creams is the Pret. Perhaps you have one near you. There are, in words from the company’s website, ‘circa 100’ branches in the country now. Their aesthetic is even more maximalist: I have learned you can get indigestion from reading a menu. ‘Cheesecakeshakes’, ‘toffee white choc waffle wedges’, ‘lemon meringue cheesecake sundaes’. There is a drink worth 1,410 calories (that’s the large vanilla milk tea for those who need to insulate themselves for winter). To avoid the charge of poisoning our young, Creams has introduced ‘fruit skewers’ on its menu – that old classic.
The ‘dessert parlour’ market is estimated at more than £500 million a year. This is slightly more than the ten-pin bowling market, as well as being four times higher than the National Theatre’s annual income. Creams is the biggest franchise, but several people prefer Kaspa’s. Most of us who stumble upon them don’t like what we find: in a Google Review of the former Finsbury Park branch of Creams, which is now a Holland & Barrett, Ronnie London said: ‘Disgusting place, nasty people. All they do is just waffles. The coffee machine doesn’t work, this machine doesn’t work, that machine doesn’t work. Disgusting. Don’t even bother going there. Disgusting place.’
Betty’s Café Tea Rooms these are not: the interiors of Creams are comprised of black fake bricks, purple leather banquettes and neon signs that should say things like ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’ or ‘Poison warning’ but instead say: ‘Eat like no one’s watching’. People think these places stay afloat because of young Muslims who go to dessert cafés instead of the pub, because they don’t drink.
But this doesn’t quite pass the sniff test. Before it closed last year, I noticed that my local Creams never had anyone in it, and the same goes for any branch I pass elsewhere. In London, Creams doesn’t even demographically map onto parts of town with the highest Muslim populations. There’s a concentration of branches in central, west and south-west London, including the rather white Putney. The only branch in Tower Hamlets (39.9 per cent Muslim) is a poky one in Whitechapel, and there’s nothing in other Muslim-heavy areas such as Stratford, East Ham and Ilford.
Some have suggested that Muslim women hang out in dessert cafés with each other while their husbands meet at shisha bars, but anyone who lives in a city can see that women prefer to meet up in regular cafés. I’ve noticed several branches of Joe & the Juice rammed in the evenings, open until 11 too.
Instead, from reading all the reviews and the Reddit discussions, I think the popularity of dessert cafés can’t be assigned to Muslim kids hanging out with each other. I think they’re popular because of Uber Eats and Deliveroo customers, for whom the pandemic never ended, for whom Tupperware has replaced plates, for whom the chow mein three hours earlier didn’t touch the sides. In journalism, you have to read a lot of depressing things, but few are bleaker than reading a Google Review so angry it was written in caps lock about the Finsbury Park Creams not filling the cup full enough with three scoops of Oreo ice cream.
‘Can I please have the Dubai pistachio kunafa chocolate cheesecake?’ I say back at EL&N, thus uttering a more embarrassing procession of words than telling the GP’s receptionist you’ve messed up the stool sample. Ten minutes later, something that looks similar to the latter arrives. The problem is that it tastes weirdly good, because it’s all sugar, and my monkey brain is evolutionarily trained to want as much of this as possible so I survive. Of course, this food is death, not life, so I leave half of it. My empty table is cleared and a new family is seated in seconds.
Comments