High tea: the low-cost way to dine out in style

It is a chilly, rainy afternoon in the centre of York and the queue for Betty's tea room is snaking around its famous art-deco façade. Inside it is warm and cosy. All the tables are taken and a gentle murmur of polite conversation bubbles up from couples and groups as they reach across to pour each other tea from silver pots and pop the daintiest of sandwiches and cakes into their mouths, plucked from the highly polished three-tiered stands.

As we were ushered to our table by our impeccably polite and starch-aproned waitress, it is easy to see why this post-meridiem ritual is soaring in popularity in these straitened financial times. Some tea rooms are reporting that business is 30 per cent up on this time last year as diners turn their back on the wallet-busting evening meal in order to help them beat the credit crunch.

Afternoon tea at Betty's has been a Yorkshire institution ever since Swiss-born Frederick Belmont opened his first café in the nearby spa town of Harrogate. He got his idea for the design of the York branch after joining the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary in 1936. It still feels like the inside of an ocean liner with its go-faster mirrors and Lloyd Loom chairs. The place continues to ooze the sepia-tinted charm of England between the wars.

Yet customers are getting younger – with the Starbucks generation going in search of something a little more home-grown and authentic. It is, of course, also rather popular with tourists.

At the Ritz in London, for example, where afternoon tea will set you back £37-a-head, there is a three-month waiting list to get a table for one of the five daily sittings. At Betty's, traditional afternoon tea costs just £14.95. For that you can expect a selection of immaculately cut fingers of sandwich – egg, ham, salmon, chicken but, surprisingly, no cucumber. This is followed by an artery clogging cream scone – a suitably calorific segue into the cake selection – in our case a lemon Madeleine, a fresh-fruit tartlet and a ganache profiterole, all washed down with half a dozen cups of Ceylon blue sapphire and a pot of China rose petal. The children were happy to work their way from the cakes upwards (spooning the jam and clotted cream directly into their mouths) while the adults raced them to the sugar hit from the sandwiches down.

Afternoon tea is a treat, certainly, but for those used to shelling out the best part of £10 each day for the pleasure of a lunchtime bucket of cappuccino and a gunky cellophane-wrapped sandwich, it is far from unreasonable. And if, like me, you are a sucker for the doomed romance of the Second World War, Betty's is a particular treat. It was here that the airmen from the bomber squadrons stationed in the surrounding Yorkshire countryside set up there unofficial wartime Ops room. A mirror outside the gentlemen's still contains the good luck etchings made by hundreds of Canadian, Australian and British young men, many of whom took sweethearts here before going down in flames over occupied Europe.

High tea, it seems, was invented in the early 19th century by the Duchess of Bedford as a way of getting around a mid-afternoon energy dip in an age when lunch was seldom eaten. She established the fashion for tea and sandwiches by asking aristocratic friends to her boudoir at Woburn for a nibble, before extending it in fine weather to include a stroll in the grounds.

In London, it migrated to the drawing room – an ideal pre-cursor before the evening walk around Hyde Park. Because it was eaten at lap height, the rich continued to refer to the meal as low tea. The lower orders however soon got in on the act, but preferred to take it at their dining tables – hence high tea. Betty's maître d', Alan Stockdale, has been working at the café for 36 years, but believes the ritual remains little changed. Of course, now people want organic and locally sourced food. By night, there is opera and jazz. But the essential appeal remains little altered. Not that things always go smoothly in the tea room, recalls Mr Stockdale, who once had to evict a stray peacock which had sauntered in from the nearby Museum Gardens in search of a refresher.

Of course, it is the tea itself, which remains firmly at the centre of the ritual. According to Ian Brabbin, head of tea buying at Taylors of Harrogate, the drink is fighting back in popularity after coming under attack for years from coffee and soft drinks. Each tea has its distinctive characteristic, he explains. Assam should be malty and strong, Kenyan tea, from where the vast majority of tea drunk in Britain now emanates, should be bright and brisk. Sri Lankan high-grown tea is celebrated for its mellow and citrus flavour.

Wandering back into the mid-afternoon gloom, full of cake and sandwich, one certainly feels the world is a better place. The children might be a little hyper-active, but so what. The only problem – I'm never going to eat my dinner.

Personal service

Helen Fraser will personally drive you around historic Edinburgh taking in some of the city's top spots followed by afternoon tea on the Borders at Cringletie House Hotel. (www.afternoonteatours.co.uk ; 07873 211 856)

Murder mystery tea

Solve the murder on the Orient Express at the Rose in Vale Hotel, followed by cake and cucumber sandwiches. (Mithian St Agnes, Cornwall; 01872 552 202)

Slim tea

A traditional tea can be fearsomely fattening. So The Metropolitan London has launched Afternoon De-light, offering no-bread sandwiches, crème fraîche instead of clotted cream and fresh fruit purées. (Old Park Lane, London; 020-7447 4857)

Royal-tea

If afternoon tea is about being a little bit posh, why not go the whole hog and have tea at a royal residence? (Windsor Castle, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4; 01753 831118)

Blokes' tea

Dainty nibbles are a touch camp for some red-blooded men. They should try the Man Tea, featuring roast sirloin sandwiches, chicken satay, whisky and bloke-ish banter. (Mandeville Place, London, W1U; 020-7935 5599)

Funk tea

If you thought piano tinkling was ideal music for tea, think again. The MAUVE bar at The Howard puts on "funky jazz" DJs for its Afternoon Beats tea each Friday and Saturday. (Temple Place, London, WC2R; 020-7836 3555)

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