Rise of the five-star jammy dodger as top hotels embrace ‘bakery tourism’
Croissants, cheese straws and iced buns are drawing queues round the block — and smart hotels are taking note
When I worked as a trainee at an ad agency in Mayfair in the early 2000s, hotel bars were the last word in glamour. The velvet ropes, the theatrical furniture, the diaphanous floor-to-ceiling curtains — I couldn’t get enough of it all. I never thought about the people paying hundreds to stay in the rooms upstairs: I was there for the just-about-affordable cocktails, the vibes, the possible Kate Moss sightings. Cosmopolitans at St Martins Lane, martinis at The Sanderson: these were my gateway drugs to luxury hotels.
But tastes have changed. For today’s twentysomethings, cocktails are out and pastries are in. Alcohol consumption is plummeting and “treat culture” — the practice, in periods of economic uncertainty, of rewarding oneself with small, inexpensive indulgences like a cinnamon bun — is on the up. It’s not just about popping to your local Gail’s: Gen Zs are building whole holidays around pastries.
“Every day, we serve people who have travelled to Scotland from as far as New Zealand and Japan specifically to come to the bakery,” says Darcie Maher, the 28-year-old founder of Edinburgh’s Lannan Bakery, which had queues around the block at 5am when it first opened in 2023. “I’m planning to put a guidebook together because so many customers ask us what else to do while they’re here.”
Hotels, always on the lookout for new ways to lure younger customers through their revolving doors, are taking note. Rooms at Claridge’s start at £930, but since January, when the hotel opened an artisanal bakery, you can go there for a Marmite cheese straw that will cost you just £3.50. “We pride ourselves on excellence at Claridge’s,” the hotel’s managing director Thomas Kochs tells me. “But that doesn’t have to mean lobster and caviar or Dom Pérignon. It can also be executed in a benchmark bread or a little pastry.”
So is the baked good the new five-star hotel diffusion line, the pain au chocolat the new Negroni? And are the treats at the grand hotels as delectable as the ones at the destination bakeries that inspired them? I went to find out.
My first stop was the Cedric Grolet café at The Berkeley hotel in Knightsbridge. The French patissier, who also has an outpost at Le Meurice, is famed for his intricate laminated pastries and tropical fruit desserts so perfect they could be AI — his demos have earned him 14mn Instagram followers. As I waited to be seated, I watched a young couple snap the stripy croissants, trompe l’oeil apples and cakes piped with daisy petals that sat alluringly on the counter. I ordered what looked like a miniature mango, with a white chocolate shell and a sublime ganache and creamy purée inside, all the more mind boggling considering it was entirely vegan.
At Nicolas Rouzaud’s outpost at The Connaught, I ate a laminated “Trio au Chocolat” threaded with dark, hazelnut and white chocolate that I worry will ruin me for the humble pain au chocolat forever. Rouzaud has just opened a second London outpost in Piccadilly’s posh Burlington Arcade, a 15-minute walk away: a can’t-miss-it vision in glossy scarlet and pink, its windows piled with cake boxes and brioches à tête, another Rouzaud signature, displayed under glass cloches inside.
If Grolet and Rouzaud are creating sugary haute couture, Claridge’s is erring on the side of the traditional bakery. Its executive chef and creative director is London-born sourdough legend Richard Hart, who was head baker at pioneering San Francisco bakery Tartine and worked with Noma’s René Redzepi in Copenhagen. He is now based in Mexico City, where he launched Green Rhino bakery last summer.
Claridge’s bakery is at the back of the hotel on an unassuming mews crowded with Lime bikes. When I visited on a sunny Wednesday morning, a poodle was tied to the black velvet rope outside. Through the windows, I could see head baker Frédéric Doncel-Latorre and members of his team moulding baguettes and slicing long strips of pastry into triangles for croissants, like tailors cutting fabric.
I joined the queue and chatted to a couple from Cornwall, sourdough hobbyists on their second visit to the bakery in as many days. They raved about the ham and cheddar cheese swirl and the sourdough, which they thought was remarkably good value at £6 for a kilo, and ordered a loaf and two Belgian buns. “The nicest thing about the bakery is it’s good old British stuff,” a customer in his forties who lives a five-minute walk away told me; he discovered the bakery on a run and now comes at least once a week.
My selection of sweet treats included a raspberry iced finger, a joyful-looking jammy dodger and a French fancy — versions of which I enjoyed courtesy of Mr Kipling in the 1980s. “There are a lot of things on the menu that I grew up eating,” Hart tells me over the phone from Mexico, where he’s just returned after six weeks at Claridge’s. “They were full of additives and preservatives back then — we make them with the best ingredients.”
The smorgasbord at Claridge’s reminded me of the offerings at Pump Street Bakery in Orford, Suffolk, which was one of the UK’s first to become a destination in its own right and where I cut my teeth as a bakery tourist. “We’re at the end of a long road, eight miles from the nearest intersection,” says Joanna Brennan, who founded the bakery with her father Chris in 2010. “No one comes here by accident.” Pump Street opened just after the financial crisis and a decade before lockdowns found us stacking our fridges with sourdough starters. “We were hugely affected by ‘treat culture’,” Brennan says. “It’s the lipstick effect — people buy small luxuries in times of recession, which in our case meant spending a couple of pounds extra to upgrade their Saturday morning pastry and have an experience at the same time.”
Fifteen years later, there’s still a queue at the weekend for Pump Street’s sourdough loaves, almond croissants, doughnuts and (my favourite) Eccles cakes, displayed in a long glass case like museum objects. Pump Street’s customers are a mix of villagers, regulars from as far away as Cambridge, and bakery pilgrims who take selfies in front of the bakery’s Suffolk pink facade. The odd celebrity drops by too: I’ve rubbed shoulders with Keira Knightley. In 2021, a second destination on the baked-goods-bagging trail appeared in Suffolk, when Alice Norman opened Pinch at Maple Farm, 12 miles north of Orford. Its prize pastry is the cruller, an airy doughnut made from choux pastry and flavoured with ingredients such as maple syrup, bacon and hazelnuts — about 200 are sold each day in peak season.
Lannan’s Darcie Maher says that while the cost-of-living crisis might have made baked goods more attractive than that old foodie trophy, the £150 tasting menu, she also credits a newfound appreciation for the artistry of baking after all those pandemic-era saggy sourdoughs and floppy croissants. “We put as much care and time into a pastry as a chef would into a dish in a restaurant, but at £6 or £7, they’re far more accessible.”
Back at Claridge’s, I resist the merch — a stylish white baseball cap with “BAKER” printed on it in pale yellow — and take my bounty home on the Tube. The moist, springy sourdough is the best I’ve ever tasted; my son loves the spongy iced finger with its tangy raspberry topping. My favourite nostalgic treat is the jammy dodger, a crunchy shortbread biscuit with a smiley face and a generous filling of raspberry jam that’s a closer relation to the tarts my mother used to buy from our local bakery than the supermarket biscuits. “I would never have put a smiley face on a pastry a few years ago,” Hart admits when I ask him about them, “but I think it’s kind of cute.”
My Gen Alpha daughter agreed, and requested another “emoji biscuit” the next day. I expect Claridge’s will have launched a different diffusion line by the time she reaches her twenties but after that first, tasty entree, I’m sure she’ll be back for more.