A teashop like no other: Sally Lunn’s Historic Eating House reviewed

Sally Lunn’s is a teashop in Bath. It sits in a lane by the abbey, and the Roman baths. Paganism and Christianity jostle here: Minerva battles Christ, who wins, for now. Sally Lunn’s calls itself ‘the oldest house in Bath’ (c. 1482). It is rough-hewn, with a vast teal window and pumpkins on display. The pumpkins might be plastic. I don’t know. Tourists queue in the hallway behind a large wooden cutout of a woman who might be Sally Lunn. She is a semi-mythical woman: the Huguenot refugee Solange Luyon, who came to Bath in the 1680s with brioche in her hands. No one knows if she really existed.

I am fond of Sally Lunn’s, because my cousin brought me here in 1982, and I ate a teacake – a Sally Lunn bun is just a large teacake – as big as my head. It was a formative experience: it was my first visit to Bath and, being a Janeite, my cousin threw in a four-poster bed.

But I am conscious of Sally Lunn’s fault, which is a favourite of this column: hubris. This is a tragic heroine of a teashop and, for that – and more than that – I like it.

The Sally Lunn bun is huge and sweet, designed to be served with salty melted butter and rich, cheap strawberry jam. (It must be cheap. The artisanal jam – which Bath excels in, being a hotbed of bourgeois socialist activism – is not for the Sally Lunn bun.) If that is heroism, the tragic flaw is this: at lunch and dinner, Sally Lunn’s, which is quite monomaniacal for a teashop, substitutes the Sally Lunn bun for the potato. The result is grotesque, like watching the man you love stab a kitten.