Apple Butter Cafe, London W1: ‘Food to make a diabetes doctor sigh anxiously’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants

When the world isn’t particularly sweet, sometimes we all need a sharp blast of teeth-chattering, sugary goo …

Apple Butter Cafe, which recently opened a second branch at the top of London’s Regent Street, is very much a cafe of its time. Today’s young may be eschewing the vices of yesteryear – booze, ciggies, drugs, etc – but their Achilles heel is sugar. Build a cafe that serves short stacks of chunky, fat pancakes smothered in banoffee syrup and topped with mini meringues, shards of tempered chocolate, quenelles of thick cream and microplaned lemon zest, and they will come. Post a video on TikTok of someone blowtorching said pancake stack, so the meringue browns and gives the whole hot mess a baked alaska vibe, however, and your customers will queue from 8am for the chance to make their own content next to the fake plastic trees “growing” inside the cafe.

Sugar is the most cheerily pernicious of vices. I come from a long line of bingo-winged, eccles cake-addicted Methodist women who wear smock dresses, so I am condemned by my DNA to seek out plentiful bowls of apple crumble pancakes with spiced fruit. No calories are printed on Apple Butter Cafe’s menu – not on the creme brulee french toast nor the croissant butter pudding with custard and pecan nuts. Both dishes, I suspect, would make a diabetes doctor sigh anxiously. That said, one benefit of Apple Butter Cafe’s new Langham Place branch is that it is a mere hop, skip and jump from Harley Street, though those in the medical profession may well see “hopping” as your destiny after too much vanilla cheesecake or saffron milk cake in a custardy puddle strewn with petals.