The Hairy Fig

Everyone wants to be Beyoncé. At this very minute I’m one of at least 100 women swinging around their rooms, holding their boobs and jiggling to Irreplaceable (probably a fact).  But sometimes your day is flat, or you know, worse than flat, and your inner Beyoncé curls up her fabulous legs, gets into the foetal position and shrinks into the day’s northern dribble. The struggle to get her back often requires alcohol or the opposite sex (if you know what I mean, a different kind of jiggling), long phone calls home or the company of friends.

My soul savlon of choice is tea. And friends. I live for tea with friends. Last week, I scooped up a spectacular specimen of friend, and we went to The Hairy Fig. Fighting my way through the layers of detritus hanging all over the shop, I’m happy to say that I was on good form… a solid 90% Beyoncé. After a couple of hours surrounded by the mist of tea and treats, (and the company of my friend), I left zinging with so much love for life, I skipped home and was as close to Beyoncé as a daft undergraduate student at York can get. The next time I have a flat, Beyoncé-less day and go missing, this is where you’ll find me, squashed in among the tea pots, sobbing into the potted shrimp and passion fruit cheesecake.

I’ve been walking past the Hairy Fig for over 2 years and never realised it was a tea room. This is because it’s actually a shop that sells figs. It also sells jars upon jars of vinegars and oils, as well as chocolate treats and cheeses, in case figs aren’t your thing. I don’t want to get trapped describing tea-rooms with Harry Potter metaphors, but if you imagine a Hagrid’s hut in which figs are sold, you’d be getting the right idea. Behind a little roped off area at the back, a worn collection of miss-matched tables and chairs are squished together with their miss-matched customers and the most delicious cakes known to Fossgate. It’s the kind of cake that you start eating with a fork and finish up with your fingers, face and tongue to make sure NONE OF THE CRUMBS ESCAPE.  They also do pink lemonade (yes, yes, yes, yes, yes).  The owners are wonderful people who clearly trust any customer of theirs will be an upstanding young chappy, as it took myself and every other tea fanatic in there a good twenty minutes to find the owner, who had left, quite casually, for some unknown reason.

Never underestimate the power of tea. And if you’re ever feeling down, please come and join me in the Hairy Fig for a slice of banana cake. We can sing Beyoncé songs really loudly into our tea. I’m sure the owners won’t mind.

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Tea Pots: Erm… dunno… didn’t see one.

Scones and other available cakes: 10, 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10.

Kitchness: 10.

Total awesomeness: 8.

The Hairy Fig can be found at 39 Fossgate.