Tea? You can’t better Bettys
The celebrated Yorkshire scones and tortes are still in demand 100 years on, Harry Wallop discovers
Britain’s high streets are now so dominated by coffee shops that it is hard to remember that tea rooms used to be a staple in every town and city. Lyons Corner Houses and the Aerated Bread Company have both long gone, but in Yorkshire there is a small chain of tea rooms that has not just survived into the 21st century, but is about to celebrate its centenary in rude health.
Bettys has just six tea rooms, but
they are as much a part of Yorkshire legend as Wuthering Heights or Geoffrey Boycott’s forward defence. Its range of products, from florentines and Engadine tortes to Yorkshire curd tarts and Fat Rascals, manages to be both elegantly continental and unforgivingly northern – which is the secret to its success, according to its loyal customer base.
At the Harrogate outlet, on a soggy Thursday afternoon, the tea room – which stretches across three floors and can serve 1,400 covers on a busy day – is packed. Amid the art deco mirrors, pinafored waitresses and trolleys laden with vanilla slices and tartes au citron, there are pensioners having a simple cup of Earl Grey and families celebrating with the full-blown £39 centenary afternoon tea, involving a prawn cocktail, sandwiches, scones and cakes galore.
Julie Salt, 60, and Angela Hurst are old friends and celebrating Hurst’s impending birthday, with a lunch of quiche, salad and a glass of pink champagne. “I first came here with my grandad when I was eight,” Hurst says. “And I’ll be 60 in a couple of weeks. Whenever I say I’m going up north, people always say: ‘are you going to Bettys?’”
Salt says the highlight of her meal has been the pudding: a Fat Rascal, a speciality at Bettys, which made 435,000 of them last year. Halfway between an oversized fruit scone and a rock cake and served warm with butter, its appeal escapes me. Salt is appalled at my scepticism. “Honestly, it was the best one I’ve ever had: warm, crispy, it melted in your mouth,” she insists. “It was perfect.” Hurst is baffled that the Fat Rascal and Bettys have never made it down south. “It’d go down a storm in London.”
It probably would. But Bettys is confined to Yorkshire – though do not think that this limits the company’s reach. Bettys encompasses not just the six tea rooms and accompanying shops (selling pastries, cakes, boxes of chocolates and fresh bread), a cookery school, the Taylors of Harrogate coffee brand and Yorkshire Tea, Britain’s second-biggest tea brand.
“And it’s in danger of becoming Britain’s biggest,” says Lesley Wild. She is the chairman of the company, having taken over in 2011 from her husband Jonathan, the great-nephew of the founder who stepped down to concentrate on his work for an environmental charity. Though she was not born into the founding family, she grew up in Yorkshire and is determined that the company will never expand out of the county. Not even across the Pennines, I gently ask over a scone and cup of tea.
“Lancashire! Goodness me, wash your mouth out!” she laughs, before explaining the logic of staying local. “Bettys is a labour of love. A huge amount of care and attention and training goes into what we do on a daily basis. We have one bakery, where everything is made fresh every day. And there is a limit to how far our vans can travel.”
If it expanded to, say, Bath or Oxford, places that would embrace the art deco elegance of Bettys, it would need to open a second bakery. “You may think we’re control freaks, but we’re more interested in small and beautiful than rolling out lots of branches. People think we’re completely mad.”
It certainly hasn’t damaged the business, still owned by the family. Turnover increased 10 per cent to £208million in 2018 and group operating profit was
£11.2 million.
The company is so rooted in Yorkshire that many do not realise it was founded by an immigrant. Wild will unveil a plaque on Wednesday, Bettys’ 100th birthday, to honour its founder Fritz Bützer, born in Switzerland, but orphaned at the age of five then sold to a local farmer as cheap labour. He arrived in Britain, aged 22, desperate for a better life, not speaking a word of English, but with the offer of a job as a confectioner. The only snag: he lost the name of his prospective employer or even the town they were based. He could only remember it sounded like “bratwurst”. Which, so the legend goes, explains how he ended up in Bradford. Where he found the name “Betty” from is lost in the mists of time, though a musical of the same name was a hit in 1919.
If you scan the menu of the tea rooms, with its bacon and raclette rösti, chicken schnitzel and Swiss wine list, there is a distinct Alpine feel, something Wild was very keen to inject back into the business.
The Swiss heritage is impossible to escape when you visit the company’s bakery, on the edge of Harrogate. It not only has a steeppitched chalet roof that would be at home in the Emmental valley, but also a large cow bell in reception. It is here that 160 different products are made, mostly destined for the tea rooms, some for mail order, nearly all by hand. The decorating room is something Fritz (who anglicised his name to Frederick) would recognise, along with the rose and violet creams and the Engadine torte, a Swiss speciality. It is rich and sophisticated and a world away from a Fat Rascal, which might baffle Frederick as it was invented by Wild’s husband as recently as 1983.
Showing me around is Joanne Baron, who has worked for the company for 32 years and admits she doesn’t like Bettys’ bestseller. “I just don’t like fruit in my buns,” she says with a laugh.
In her time, she’s noticed Bettys’ range of products change subtly to reflect Britain’s changing taste buds: “There’s more sweet and less savoury than 20 years ago, I’d say.” Various meat pasties have been dropped, but the ranges of chocolates and macaroons have exploded.
Bettys has benefited not just from Britain’s increasingly sweet tooth, but from a fundamental change to the consumer economy: we now want to spend our money on experiences, rather than “stuff ”.
You can’t buy a cup of Earl Grey and a vanilla slice on the internet. “It’s a treat,” Wild says, trying to explain why afternoon tea has become such big business across Britain. “What I hope we offer here is an oasis of civilisation and calmness and deliciousness.”
At the table next to where Wild and I were chatting was Pauline Waters, 82, a Harrogate local, who remembers coming to Bettys as a child. I ask her why she comes. “The staff are just fantastic. My mother was in service donkeys years ago so I know how difficult it is. The service has given me a lift; I feel better coming out than when I came in.”
With customer endorsements like that, it’s possible Bettys could survive another 100 years – just don’t expect one in London any time soon.
bettys.co.uk