Recently Mr. C and I went back to the rather lovely Pettigrew Tea Rooms for our Wedding Anniversary.

Ok, so some of you might wonder why we might choose to go out for Afternoon Tea instead of out for a slap-up meal at a fancy restaurant. Well the thing is that both of us happily agree that afternoon tea is our ‘favourite meal’. Way before our anniversary we had already unanimously decided where we wanted to go – The Pettigrew Tea Rooms, smack bang in the centre of Cardiff at the main entrance to Bute Park by the Castle.

Pettigrew Tea Rooms

……. the name itself already conjures up another age,  – a slower, more refined world where people took their time over their refreshments. A time when people didn’t just rush into and straight out of a ‘chain’ coffee-shop with a polystyrene bucket of double-shot, soy, caramel, sticky-toffee-pudding latte with extra thingummyjigs. It’s a smallish place with smiley staff, mis-matched crockery, home-made cakes and charm in abundance.

We’ve been to bigger, ‘posher’, smarter places for tea. We’ve been to places with awards/rosettes/stars and numerous accolades to their name but these charming, happy tea rooms in the heart of Cardiff have become our favourite.

For starters you get to choose which sandwiches you want and when they come, they’re neat and tidy but not so insubstantial that you wonder what’s the point. The scones are of the buttery and melt-in-your-mouth variety and the numerous slabs of home-made cakes you can choose from are out-of-this world.

Ok, I may have gone overboard on the cliches here in my attempt to extol the Pettigrew’s many virtues but the Pettigrew Tea Rooms really is a very individual, personable place which you have to experience for yourself to see what I mean. Go! I can guarantee you won’t be disappointed. At least we never have been.

(You may like to read: ‘I Could Get Used To Champagne Afternoon Tea‘ too.)