A taste of Britain
Harrogate
The north’s home of cream teas
Ask anyone in the north of England to name a tasty afternoon tea and the chances are they will point you in the direction of Bettys. Now a Yorkshire institution with six tearooms, a craft bakery and a cookery school, the first café opened on Harrogate’s Cambridge Crescent back in 1919.
Disappointingly, there is no real-life, cake-baking matriarch called Betty behind the empire, but rather a Swiss confectioner, Frederick Belmont, who only alighted here after boarding the wrong train. Such serendipity shouldn’t distract from the fact that Belmont put Harrogate on the culinary map. There are two Bettys Café Tea Rooms in the town today, the flagship on Parliament Street and a second at Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Harlow Carr.
It is far from the only mouth-watering destination in the spa town. Fodder is the best place to start, a vast food hall and café backed by the Yorkshire Agricultural Society that sells all manner of
