Creams cafE in Slough, west of London, was quiet at eight o’clock on a recent Friday evening. An hour and a half later it was packed. Families and young people in single-sex groups crowded around the counter, loading up on ice cream and other sweet treats. Such is the pattern during Ramadan.
The café is one of 94 Creams outlets in Britain, and one of hundreds of dessert cafés. Across the road sits a branch of Heavenly Desserts, a rival, which opened in 2023. A few minutes’ walk along the high street brings you to two more cafés, run by different companies. The spreading of dessert cafés (the industry strongly favours the French word “dessert” over the more English “pudding”) points to social and cultural changes in Britain.
Adam Mani, who co-founded Creams in 2008, began by opening in places with lots of Asian Muslims, who (he reasoned) were hungry for places to socialise that did not serve alcohol. Slough is such a place. The town has a reputation for dull homogeneity, thanks to a rude poem by John Betjeman and to “The Office”, a British tv comedy that was set there, but is hugely diverse in reality. It has the second-highest share of Asians in the population of any English local authority after Redbridge, a London suburb.
Assumptions have changed, however. These days Creams pays little attention to ethnic or religious patterns when considering café sites, says Everett Fieldgate, its chief executive. Dessert cafés have opened in towns and cities with small populations of Asians and Muslims, such as Liverpool. Being mostly halal, they are places where Muslims can eat, not Muslim eateries.
Britons, especially young ones, are drinking less in general, and thus potentially easier to sell waffles and ice cream to. And it is becoming harder to target groups even if a company wished to do that. All three censuses of England and Wales from 2001 to 2021 showed a fall in residential segregation among every ethnic group.
The food that the dessert cafés serve reflects their catholicity. Little Dessert Shop, which was founded in 2014 and now has about 50 cafés, has created a “Ramadan milkshake” containing dates, which are often used to break a fast. But last autumn it concocted a cheesecake for Diwali, a Hindu festival. It is now marketing a waffle containing Easter eggs. “We don’t want to limit ourselves,” says Mu’azzam Ali, one of the chain’s founders.
If an Easter-egg waffle sounds odd, the cafés have much more. Heavenly Desserts sells “croffles”, which split the difference between croissants and waffles. Kaspa’s offers a waffle with salted pretzels. Creams sells a sundae containing lemon meringue pie. A blended country has created a startlingly blended cuisine. ■
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