Maison Bertaux

Scones, cream cakes and a pot of tea

The order at Maison Bertaux is the one it has been serving since 1871: something from the window, a pot of speciality tea, and a seat upstairs. Fresh artisan scones are the house signature and the item most at home in the format, with English Black Forest tea a good pairing for them.

Around the scones sit cheesecakes, cream cakes, French pastries, savouries, and the wedding cakes the shop has been making for decades. Coffee is on the list, but it accompanies the baking rather than headlining it. This is a patisserie and a tearoom, and the counter is arranged accordingly, with the cakes leading and the drinks chosen to suit whichever one you pick.

One shop in Soho, two floors

Everything happens at a single historic Soho address: a ground-floor patisserie counter with the illuminated window that stops people on the pavement, and an upstairs room arranged as a cafe and gallery where the cake actually gets eaten. The shop was founded in 1871 by a French Communard who had fled Paris, serving London's French community.

The continuity has outlasted the neighbourhood around it. Soho has gone from French enclave to a dense mix of dining, media, nightlife and tourism, and Maison Bertaux has stayed a working daily bakery through all of it. Alexander McQueen was among its loyal customers, and the room still draws the same mix of locals, theatre crowds and people who came for the window.

How to spend an hour there

Begin with the scones, then look at the cheesecake, the other order regulars come back for. Cream cakes and French pastries fill in the rest of the counter, and the savouries are useful if the stop is more of a light bite than a cake visit.

Choose the tea before the cake if you care about the pairing, since the speciality list is where the tearoom half of the room lives. The rhythm is old-fashioned in the useful sense: choose downstairs, carry it up, and let the visit take as long as it takes. The wedding cakes are the part of the trade most visitors never see, and they are the clearest sign that this is a working patisserie rather than a tea room with a counter attached. More than 150 years on, that is still the whole proposition.