A Wimbledon restaurant has been forced to serve scones on a secret menu after having replaced them with Welsh cakes.
The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club removed the baked good from the afternoon tea menu this year at the Renshaw restaurant, which charges £467 per person for debenture-holders.
Instead, they have been replaced by Welsh cakes – sweeter, thinner pastries fried in a griddle pan rather than baked – alongside raspberry and lime jam with lemon curd.
The addition of the pastry comes as the restaurant was refurbished for this year’s Championship and welcomed a new Welsh head chef, Bryn Williams.
The restaurant is continuing to serve scones to customers who specially request them, having received complaints that the British favourite was absent from the menu during the first week of the Championship.
A debenture-holder – who pay up to £116,000 for guaranteed on-court tickets for a five-year period – told The Telegraph that he asked: “What’s all this Welsh rubbish?” when he noticed scones were not listed on the menu and was allegedly told by a member of staff that they had some “in the back”.
Another guest at the restaurant said it was a “shame” scones weren’t on the menu, adding that they were a part of Wimbledon tradition.
“Wimbledon just has this magic, and so much of that comes from the traditions you look forward to every single year,” he said. “Take the scones with jam and cream – honestly, they’re just as essential to the whole Wimbledon vibe as a glass of Pimm’s or a bowl of strawberries and cream.”
He added: “It’s a shame that they weren’t easy to find this time around.”
Scones served with strawberry jam and clotted cream have long popular at Wimbledon, with 83,290 portions sold at last year’s Championship.
The restaurant, which serves afternoon tea between 3pm and 5pm, invites guests to “enjoy an afternoon tea inspired by Bryn’s Welsh traditions”.
Describing his culinary approach, Mr Williams said: “I brought a little bit of North Wales down to Wimbledon – that was the idea.”
Named after William and Ernest Renshaw, whose dominance at Wimbledon in the 1880s helped transform lawn tennis into a popular spectator sport, the restaurant boasts an “all-day dining experience celebrating contemporary, British cuisine”, according to its website.
In a further break with tradition, the restaurant is also serving “coronation chickpea”, a vegetarian nod to coronation chicken.
‘Don’t mess with the classics’
Responding to the recent additions, a disgruntled debenture-holder said: “They might say it’s for a change, but we only go to Wimbledon once a year.”
Another patron said: “I get that the chefs want to change things up and try new things, but that should be extra – you don’t mess with the classics everyone loves.”
The All England Club is moving towards offering more plant-based options to help reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
Joe Furber, senior food and drink manager at Wimbledon, said: “We’re aware that [vegetarianism] is a growing culinary trend and a growing consumer trend. There’s an increase in plant-based diets, so we’re looking to accommodate that.”
However, he stressed that the Championship was “not flipping all our menus” to be plant-based and that it aimed to give players and guests as much choice as possible.
Mr Williams added that customers were choosing to eat plant-based options earlier in the day because they are lighter.
“It’s not because it’s meat or fish, they just choose to have something lighter, but the most important thing is it’s a tasty plate of food,” he said. “The flavour and the plate of food, regardless of meat, fish, or vegetables: that should be the emphasis on it, and the customer gets the choice.”