Joe Ellis determined the save the English tea room

The renowned tea critic visits Peak District and Derbyshire Dales to review English tea rooms with the aim to prevent more from closing down...

Joe Ellis, a popular and controversial tea room critic, recently paid Peak District and Derbyshire Dales a visit to review English tea rooms and help owners to figure out their business’ high and lows.

His main objective is to preserve traditional English tea rooms as much as possible and provide owners with the assistance and wisdom they need to prevent more tea rooms from closing down. 

Based on Ellis own stats, there are about 15 traditional English tea rooms that are being closed down every week. To prevent this number from growing, Ellis is placing each tea room he visits and put them in his “not my cup of tea” category.

He claims that most tea rooms included in his list contacted him to ask for advice. 

Ellis was happy to report that he was delighted with most of the tea rooms he visited on both Peak District and Derbyshire Dales.

The only thing he didn’t like was the fact that most of them were self-service. He said: ‘the experience of an afternoon tea, or even brunch or lunch in a tea room should be relaxing and enjoyable. Having to order at the counter is not really conducive to this concept. I even encountered one establishment, where the waitress came to the table specifically to tell me to order at the counter…why could she have not just taken my order?’

Ellis was able to review 11 tea rooms. He missed the other two that were closed even during the opening hours and the other six that were recently closed down.

Out of 11, only one was placed in his “not my cup of tea” category because it wasn’t a tea room but more of a café.