Arctic rolls and armadillos: the cafés of yesteryear

Saturday 22 October, 1983. I’m sitting in Sayers Café on Bold Street: a forerunner of Greggs (heck, it might actually be a Greggs now) with a cake counter at the front, a self-service, strip-lit canteen-style café towards the rear, and acres of formica-topped tables and fixed plastic seating in between.

Maybe I’d been shopping at Morgan's 50p shop (massive, indispensable tubs of 'Quake-Unshakable!' hair gel; blue lurex tights; a 3-pack of Mellow Birds coffee), or the then brand-new Mattas International Foods (red lentils, in a tin). But I’d more likely made a beeline to my own little haven simply to seek refuge from a non-stop cycle of sleeping by day, waitressing in a pizza restaurant in the evening and partying until dawn.

My haven had personal history for me. My grandma occasionally took me to Sayers when I was little – circa, 1970-ish? Egg and cress barms, custard slices, Arctic roll (to me, a miracle of modern food: sponge cake wrapped around ice cream? Like: how?). 

Apparently Ken Dodd once used Sayers as a backdrop for a photo shoot for a local newspaper prior to his Christmas Laughter Spectacular at the Royal Court Theatre. I missed Doddy’s Sayers pop-up, but I was in the right place at the right time on that day in October 42 years ago when a very young Morrissey sat alone at the table next to me, picking at a buttered iced bun and making notes in a big, shabby notebook. 

I didn't know who he was, but you could tell he had something to do with pop stars. Before he left, he slid a flyer and a gig ticket onto my table: the Smiths, Haigh Building, Maryland Street. I’d never heard of the Smiths but I skipped work to go to the gig… and hated it; too many limp geeky boys in shabby overcoats, too much Morrissey lumbering around the stage wailing, whooping, and throwing limp daffodils at the geeky boys. If Sayers had been open in the evening, I’d have left the gig halfway through and gone back there for a bacon barm instead. 

Today’s Liverpool cafés are a different breed: sparkling in-house coffee roasters flaunt rotating, single-origin ethical blends made from shiny Ethiopian beans to enjoy in a shiny coworking space with wireless charging options on the tables and cool artwork on the walls – havens for a new generation who, up until fairly recently at least, probably listened to the Smiths on freshly-pressed vinyl. But café society moves with the times, not least of all in Liverpool. But way, way back when, there were the grand ones attempting to maintain the bygone glory days of a very British version of the European lifestyle: all uniformed staff, gold leafed cornices and ornate displays of croissants, mille-feuille and madeleines served by waiters wearing white gloves. 

Emporiums such as the Lyceum Café at the bottom of Bold Street, Cooper's on the corner of Church Street and Paradise Street and Kirkland Brothers’ Vienna bakery on Hardman Street (which morphed into the legendary Kirkland's Wine Bar 1975-1999 and was latterly reinvented as The Fly in the Loaf in 2004) thrived alongside the haberdasheries, tobacconists and smart department stores that defined shopping in Liverpool city centre. But those magical Aladdin's Caves, all established in the early 20^th century, couldn't survive much past the end of the fusty 1950s, never mind the new wave of British culture in the post-war years.

The workaday cafés such as Reece's Rendezvous on Tithebarn Street reflected a changing world to a new type of customer keen to swap china tea services for Melamine mugs, lured by the words Snack Bar and Self-Service (how exciting!) and the accessibly-priced luncheon meat sandwiches. Convenient? Yes. Speedy? For sure! Nobody would want to linger long at a Reece’s. And even though the word ‘rendezvous’ had a touch of European chic about it, it was never going to impress the new breed of coffee-quaffing hipsters.

The Kardomah coffee brand was established in Liverpool in 1844 in a back street warehouse office on Pudsey Street, behind the Empire Theatre. The company eventually rolled out the UK’s first coffee house chain – sort of. It was Starbucks for the beret and turtleneck brigade. In Liverpool, each of Kardomah’s seven cafés (Bold Street; Dale Street; Whitechapel; etc) had their own, distinct personalities – and their own, distinct bunch of personality-laden regulars. 

My dad used to take me to the Bold Street branch of the Kardomah more or less opposite the stuffier Lyceum. I remember men wearing sunglasses indoors on the dullest of days, and girls wearing mini skirts and patent leather go-go boots (which is probably one of the reasons the dark glasses came in handy for the guys), and a friendly waitress who suggested I sprinkle a bit of salt on my buttered toast and changed my undeveloped tastebuds forever. 

Vying for a slice of Kardomah action, there was the Scaffold’s beloved Rumbling Tum – part café, part impromptu live performance venue – on Hardman Street, the Zodiac on Duke Street (where Cilla Black was once a waitress) and the Casbah Coffee Bar opened by Beatles drummer Pete Best’s mum Mona in the cellar of her West Derby home: they all had their part to play in Liverpool's burgeoning music, poetry and arts scene in the 1960s and 70s. 

But when the coffee-quaffing beat generation burnt out with Kerouac’s yellow roman candles, Liverpool’s department store cafeterias, established in the 1960s and 70s, continued to thrive for a little bit longer. 

There was the one on the second (or third?) floor of George Henry Lee's on Church Street, where an elegant model used to drift around the tables holding a card that described her outfit and how much it would cost for you too to dress just like her ('belted pantsuit, £7.40; turban, £1.80; velveteen ankle boots, £6'). In my late teens, I’d meet my mum, sister and grandma there. I recently asked my sister if she remembered those get-togethers; she did indeed. “You used to do a lot of flouncing off from us in Lee’s, telling us all where to go before you left!”. I did. I still do a lot of flouncing off, but Lee’s has long since flounced off for good.

There was the plushily-carpeted one in Owen Owen's that my granddad used to take my sister and I to for Christmas lunch followed by a Knickerbocker Glory and a Santa meet'n'greet long before I’d mastered the art of flouncing. The cavernous Woolworths café was a little more down to earth – despite its huge art deco windows overlooking Church Street, there was no carpet, only lino tiles underfoot. The milky coffee was great, though – and the Horlicks, made in one of those impressively over-complicated ‘Horlicks machines’, was even better.

Just down the road from Woolies was the Littlewoods Café (Littlewoods being, I’m pretty sure, Primark now), all fluorescent, migraine-inducing lighting and prison-issue toilets. But oh, the strange, strange glamour of Lewis's café high up on the fifth floor! 

Lewis’s café’s ceramic tiled wall depicting smart, 1950s-era kitchen condiments, utensils and cutlery has recently been rediscovered and recognised as a masterpiece of British design from that same decade. But when I went there, as a kid, I was always too fascinated (or terrified?) by the row of beehive bonnet hairdressers in the ladies' hair salon next to the café to notice the groovy kitsch going on on the walls. 

My grandma used to meet her best friend Edna at Lewis’s, “by the wigs”. My friends and I preferred to meet at a strategic viewpoint under ‘Dickie Lewis’, Jacob Epstein’s bronzed, totally naked man perched on the prow of a ship. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not sure there are any other bronzed, naked sailors to meet under in any other city in the UK. 

In the early 1980s, the Whitechapel branch of the Kardomah once more became the nouveau hipster coffee haunt of choice; the Beatles may have long since stopped hanging out there, but it wasn’t unusual to spot one of A Flock of Seagulls, or Julian Cope, or even – bated breath! – Pete Burns sitting in the window, making sure they could be seen. 

Local band the Cherry Boys even wrote a song about the Whitechapel Kardomah (the imaginatively-titled ‘Kardomah Café’, 1983) which bypassed the UK charts but, rather oddly, proved really popular in Spain, hitting the Spanish at number six in 1984. I was too scared to go in (I spent a great deal of my early teenage life in awe of Pete Burns); when we weren’t sharing a pot of tea for two between six of us in legendary Liverpool arts world HQ the Armadillo Tea Rooms on Mathew Street (now Flanagan’s Apple), we tended to drink lukewarm Fanta at the British Home Stores café around the corner while we waited for the bus home from the under-18s matinee at Eric’s.

These lists aren't comprehensive; you'll have your own memories and your favourites, just like I have mine – and the Café Tabac at the top of Bold Street ranks high on my all-time favourite Liverpool café charts. 

I was around 13 years old when I first went to the Tabac with my dad one New Year’s Day morning. I had boiled eggs and soldiers while dad drank coffee without his usual cigar; “they call it a tabac but they don’t even sell cigars! Welcome to bloody England…”

It was just as well that the Tabac’s formidable arch-matriarch owner Rita Lawrence (“get your f*****g feet off my f*****g seats”) wasn’t there to hear dad’s complaints; she’d have put him in his place faster than he got through a packet of Hamlet.

In later years, Café Tabac became the official home-from-home for so many of my tribe, while the super-cool Café Berlin – just down the road and packed with boys who looked like a bit like Station to Station-era David Bowie and girls who aspired to be Jerry Hall – was more of a see-and-be-seen affair. But there were plenty of days and times when I just needed to hide from the gossip, from the plans about what we were doing next, from the endless who-went-where-and-said-what-to-whom-last-night… or, just eat, back when ‘just eat’ meant something very different to what it means today.

Very few of us ate out (unless you counted a bag of pakoras picked up from the back of the UNI on Renshaw Street on the way home from a night out), and even fewer cooked in our tiny kitchens beyond rustling up a bowl of Rice Krispies or a corned beef and salad cream sandwich. Why cook at home when you worked at a pizza restaurant? And anyway, at my beloved Sayers you could get a decent ham barm or a plate of their famous doorstop toast, sliced from a massive white loaf and slathered with real butter, for what, even back then, felt like pennies.

You gotta remember, kids, this was long before social media promoted brand You and Your Mates – in the 1980s, your social media was live, all the time, in real life; your presence in the right café was your passport to the next party, event or cool club night, and the next, and the next. Most of us who lived in bedsit land didn't even have a telephone line, which turned cafés into the equivalent, to me and my friends, of the old-fashioned boozer on the corner of the street: you didn’t need to spend big to hang out in one, and most of the people you knew would congregate over coffee at some point in the day, turning the gossip-grapevine into an exciting game of Chinese Whispers. 

Years have passed, and so too have the days without telephones, or Iced Matcha Latte, or Wi-Fi. Today, the choice of cafés in Liverpool is as vibrant as it ever was: elegant and extravagant or old-school retro, vegan and gluten-free or full English breakfast, board games, brunch clubs, workshops, tech-driven or ‘no phone zones’. How to choose which one to go to? Where does my ‘tribe’ hang out, today? Can I get a slice of Arctic Roll with my cold-brew Cortado… and if I sulk at a table towards the rear, might a fledgling pop icon slide a gig ticket onto my table?