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.
