A popular Keswick cafe which has built up a strong and enviable reputation for the quality of food and drink it serves is to close at the end of the month.
Mrs F’s Fine Food Emporium, on Main Street, has been run for the past 10 years by Simone Taylor and her business partner Bonsen Bonsen, who hails from Indonesia.
But they have made the difficult decision to give up the lease on the property and the last scone will be served up on Saturday September 28.
Simone, who used to run The Golden Lion pub, also on Main Street, said she had enjoyed an “amazing” time at the cafe and would miss their regular and visiting customers.
“I love this town but the world is a very different place to what it was 10 years ago,” said Simone. “Every shop and petrol station now has a coffee making machine. It’s very difficult to make a living.
“Things are so uncertain. We had the floods of 2015, then we had Covid for two years and then the cost of living crisis. You never know what is next.”
The whole concept of the cafe is that it is filled with memorabilia that can be recycled, up-cycled or purchased from a charity shop. Simone said that all the memorabilia was now for sale.
She estimated that over the years she had baked around 70,000 scones which are a cafe speciality. She said that there are still arguments over the pronunciation of the word scone and whether jam goes on before the cream. She once had a customer from Birmingham storm out of the cafe with a child in tow because it was not pronounced in the cafe the way that she had been accustomed to.
She said that the cafe had been voted number one for tea and coffee in Keswick for six years and online reviews describe it as being “wonderfully quirky” with the food, particularly the vegan chocolate cake, declared “scrumptious”.
