Week 8. Friends, suddenly realising that they haven’t seen me for a term, tentatively decide to check I’m still alive.
“No!” I shriek, “I don’t want to socialise. I will only socialise in a tea room so I can blog about it. Which I have completely failed to do. Must blog!” My beautiful, long suffering friends suggest The Gatehouse Cafe as an appropriate venue.
A first time visitor should be forgiven for confusing this place for a dark sitting room with an unexplainably large number of chairs. But it isn’t. It is in fact, a cafe. It’s a rather good cafe. It’s a rather good, deeply puzzling little cafe. It’s the Heston Blumenthal recipe of cafes. It really shouldn’t make sense. I know if I ever made egg and bacon ice cream, people would die. In the same way that if I told you I was going to set up an evangelical tea-room owned by ‘Calvary Chapel’, in a Roman wall in York staffed by Americans, full of old English leather chairs, Bibles, bad music and post-it notes about how much people love Jesus, people wouldn’t come. But they do. They fucking love it.
It’s quite exciting to walk into a cafe with a purpose (other than making money or being called Starbucks. I hate Starbucks with a deeply felt passion, the evils of which I tend to discuss over gingerbread mocha on its sofas, because, apparently, I don’t hate it enough to forfeit actually eating there.) The Gatehouse Cafe on the other hand, has two aims in life: indoctrinate customers with subliminal Jesus-love, and to be charming. Importantly, it also aims to serve food and drink as heavenly as its staff. The day I went to suss it out for my blog, I was feeling unusually adventurous, and faced with a chalk board full of exciting tea drinks, spread my virgin tea-wings, and went for an ‘African Sunrise’. It’s clearly a close relation to my usual cuppa, but made with red bush tea, vanilla and milk. The sexy cousin of the builders brew.
We sat upstairs, and I passed the first two minutes of cafe life lining myself up against the arrow slit windows and pretending to kill pedestrians with my imaginary crossbow, before they brought us our tea and goodies. Sadly, because they brought my ‘African Sunrise’ to me in a mug (with warmed brownie, doughnut and macaroon style biscuity thing all gently melting onto my plate) there was no tea pot. This meant that after a lovely conversation about how much my friends and I were all looking forward to an Easter holiday of sleeping, I was forced into a rather awkward moment in which I had to re-join the queue and ask for a flash of their teapots, so I could rank them (see below).
I was incredibly sneaky, you will be pleased to hear, and whilst the waitress bemusedly searched for teapots, took the opportunity of asking her what she was doing here, (the polite version of this, you know, “so you’re from America… and you love Jesus… and you’re working in a Cafe in York because…?” ). It turns out that all the waiters and waitresses are volunteers – presumably their profits go to some worthy cause – (Evangelical poster-boy Rick Santorum’s war on porn, perhaps?) The food is cheap, delicious and all the ‘cookies’ come with complimentary microwave warming, which is the best thing ever. The volunteers are lovely, very obliging when it came to showing mad customers their tea pots (I recommend getting into the American spirit and leaving a good tip), and the perfect place for York students to hang out, flick confusedly through Leviticus or, if that’s not your thing, plan the next commandment-busting trip to Willow.
TOP TRUMPS:
Tea pots: 4.
They were very boring, squat little silver tea pots. I would have given them a two but the girl serving was so sweet showing them to me, and not asking after my mental health, I’m going to bang in a couple of extra points.
Scones and other available cakes: 8.
I didn’t have a scone. They have mouth sized treats in jars, and microwave everything until it’s a gooey, dribbly, mouth-watering mess. Slobber at will.
Character: 10.
Kitschiness: 1.
Total awesomeness: 9.
(NB: The Gatehouse Cafe is in Walmgate Bar, up the stairs and in the wall.)