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. 

I come for the set dinner. I have no choice; it is a friend’s birthday party. I do warn her: I ate dinner here five years ago with my infant son, and the food made him cry. I ate a weird beef stew on a bun, the food of a medieval peasant, and he ate his tears.

Now, in a late medieval room, I eat an equally weird goat’s cheese dish. The bun is cut to an odd geometric shape, cooked but not toasted – it is bone white and bone hard – and covered with a slick of goat’s cheese. It is, essentially, an enormous, undercooked crouton that fell on goat’s cheese the way Percy Shelley fell on Mary Godwin. Then I order, but do not eat, a mushroom pie with vegetables that have known a microwave, a terrible fate for any vegetable.

The house is charming – shabby, interesting – but the food is unbearable. At the end, the table is littered with uneaten body parts and Sally Lunn buns. In its defence, it is cheap – just £20 a head – and the staff are kindly. I think they know the food is bad: when I tip, they are startled, as if I have given them a house.

I return the following day and find 50 people queuing, but Bath, a party town for millennia, always fed on the credulous. I am here for redemption, and it comes in the form of hot, sweet breakfast tea, with pot and strainer, which is righteous, and a Sally Lunn bun doing what it is supposed to do, which is pretending to be a large jam tart. It is exquisite: faintly blackened at the edges, heavy with sugar and salt. I visit the museum in the cellar, which has a wax Sally Lunn making wax buns with wax ennui, a small shop, Roman pottery and, I suspect, stalactites. This is a teashop like no other: avoid vaulting ambition, and you’ll thrive.