Half-baked snobbery against cake shop that leaves such a sour taste
WHAT I’d like to do right now is go to Arundel and buy a lemon yum yum from the LG Café in the town centre, which snobbish locals are trying to close. I’d like to drink to the health and wealth of the café owners with one of their cups of piping hot chocolate and tell them not to let the burghers grind them down.
I’d like to toast their muffins and curse those who would pan their cakes for no other reason than freshly baked, cherrytopped, hard-glazed snobbery.
George Johnson, 43, and his partner Lily Trunfull, 29, have run the cafe and cake shop for two years. my goodness, what a success they have made of it — home-baked cakes with attitude, sold in a wildly Instagrammable, flower-filled café, complete with funky, friendly staff.
It seems to be the kind of establishment where young, fashionable customers find it important to pose with their cake and take a picture of it rather than merely eat it; to have their cake and greet it, if you like.
I have given up trying to understand the youth and their insatiable desire to post every breath they take and every cake they don’t bake to social media.
However, George and Lily grasp it all perfectly. They have cleverly filled a gap in the market with glitter-sprinkled fresh cream confections; they have piped the custard of victory into their sugared doughnuts of desire. Through sheer hard work, talent and effort, their business has done well.
Their mad bakes and cake mash-ups, such as milky Bar Kid Yum Yums and Jammy Dodger Cupcakes, are a hit with many local customers as well as visitors who come to the picturesque Sussex town to visit the castle, cathedral and other attractions.
In fact, the LG Café, with its giant pink ribbon tied around the building, is so successful it has become a local attraction in itself. Yet not everyone is pleased.
Some of the more toffeenosed locals are not amused by this toffee-doused enterprise. A terrible and sly campaign has been launched against the LG Café, a poison-pen offensive online and by letter that has plagued the owners for months. Recently, it has become intolerable.
Lily told newspapers: ‘ At t first it was just a few snide e comments here and there, like e “who brought the rats into the town — oh, it’s that cake shop”.’
She added that it was a ‘ small, vicious group of locals and local businesses that nip away online and now they’ve got their teeth into it’.
ANONYMOUS
postings have described the café customers as ‘ maskless, scantily clad chavs’ and not ‘decent people’ like them. Depressingly, Hyacinth Bucket appears to be alive, well and flourishing in the middle of this handsome South Downs market town.
meanwhile, some social media posts have complained that the café does not adhere to Covid policies — but the couple are now operating the LG as a ‘cakeaway’ in accordance with lockdown measures, and are serving their baked goods through a hatch.
one cannot help but suspect that here, as in so many other recent instances, black-hearted malignants are weaponising Covid complaints, using them as a mask for some deeper grievance, determined to cause maximum harm to others.
George and Lily stayed quiet for a long time but decided to speak out after receiving a particularly pearlclutching letter which accused them of bringing ‘the wrong type of people to our distinguished town’. It was the last straw.
‘We can’t make excuses for this kind of thing. Bullying and harassment aren’t right,’ said George. ‘The only way you can fight hate is with love and peace.’
It is dispiriting, but perhaps not surprising, that not even a pandemic can hush the snooty drumbeat that still thrums in the darker corners of Little England.
But those who complain that the LG Café is the wrong kind of café selling the wrong kind of cakes to the wrong kind of customers are blinkered in more ways than one.
Restaurants, cafes and hotels have been devastated by the pandemic. The catering industry is on its knees, reeling from the hammer blows of myriad lockdowns from which whi it may never fully recover. Already Alr thousands of hospitality ity outlets in cities and small tow towns have closed their doors for good. That’s T just one reason why locals loc in Arundel should be celebrating cel a business and a couple co who have not only ma managed to stay open during as a series of brutal lockdowns but bu have flourished, too. I can see that some may find LG a little garish, with its cheeky ch love hearts frontage and an dim teens posing outside w with their cupcakes, but co come on. How snobbish do you yo have to be to deny anyone o a moment of sugary cheer ch in these bleak days? That’s why I salute the energy and hard h d work this young couple have poured into their business — because if you think getting up at 5am to start baking, running a café and serving the torn-scone faces of the public every day is a piece of cake, then think again.
MAnYpeople don’t realise that when this pandemic is over, that will not be the end of it. In the empty, economically shattered High Streets across the land, where even the charity shops have gone out of business, how many young couples are going to be brave or solvent enough to sign a lease on a café or a restaurant and take a chance on a new business?
So let’s celebrate the ongoing success of the LG Café and the inspiring duo who run it. Let’s hope they are not crushed like chocolate sprinkles by the sour, corrosive snobbery of a few vocal local loons.
Bake on, George and Lily. I’m with you all the way.