Did TV's Fabulous Baker Brothers bite off more than they could chew by trying to posh up the nosh in Britain's cafes for a new series?

By Vincent Graff

Published: 17:32 EDT, 15 February 2013 | Updated: 17:32 EDT, 15 February 2013

When Channel 4 launched The Fabulous Baker Brothers last year, they knew exactly what they were doing. With Tom and Henry Herbert – one a butcher, one a baker – they had a couple of presenters who tick all the boxes for a 21st-century cookery show.

The upper-crust brothers are rugged and cheeky-looking, but sensitive. And – a bonus, this – they’re pretty good cooks too.

Last time round, the handsome lads – fifth-generation scions of a family bakery business in the Cotswolds – focused on baking at home, hoodwinking the nation into believing that bread-making is a perfectly acceptable thing for blokes to do in their spare time. Sexy, even.

The Fabulous Baker Boy's aim is to breathe new life into the menus - slot in a modern recipe or two that people will love - in order to boost business for the owners

This time, Tom and Henry are on the road. They whizz around the country in an old Morris Minor, visiting tourist towns and stopping off at struggling cafes.

Their aim is to breathe new life into the menus – slot in a modern recipe or two that people will love – in order to boost business for the owners.

At the end of each show, a group of locals get to vote on which one of three recipes will get a permanent place on the cafe’s menu.

In the first episode, the lads go to working-class Blackpool – and look rather surprised when Len and Babs, owners of the Mermaid Cafe, a greasy spoon set among tattoo parlours and kebab shops, turn their noses up at the soft southerners’ first suggestion.

Tom and Henry thought they’d played it pretty safe. Their ‘Blackpool Breakfast Bap’ is basically a bacon and egg sandwich, albeit with a bit of home-made mushroom ketchup and black pudding hash sneaked in.

But that wasn’t what roused the ire of Len and Babs. ‘We’d put poppy seeds on top – black seeds for Blackpool, you know? –  and Babs said, “Don’t you know we don’t eat seeds up here?”’ smiles Henry. ‘We thought she was joking, but when the locals tried it they all said, “Lovely, yeah. But we don’t like the seeds.” So she was being honest.’

Tom says, ‘Of all the things I could’ve imagined them not liking about our cooking, the seeds were right down at the bottom of the list.

At the end of each show, a group of locals get to vote on which one of three recipes will get a permanent place on the cafe's menu

'But maybe she was trying to exert some power in the situation. Some of the cafe owners thought, “Who are you to tell us what to do? What do you know about what people round here want?”’

It was always going to be tough converting traditional cafe owners to recipes that include smoked paprika and cayenne pepper, and they repeatedly come up against conservatism. In the first show, Babs says she’s keen on keeping her menu up-to-date. What’s her latest innovation?

‘This year I introduced mushy peas,’ she says. It isn’t only in Blackpool where they see resistance. In Exmouth, Devon, the owner of the Beacon Vaults restaurant – a fancy-pants chef named Andy who offers a starter of squirrel terrine (yes, squirrel) – is not much impressed with the boys’ Smuggler’s Pie, a beef pie with apple-and-potato mash.

Clearly not refined enough for his clientele. And in York, the owners of the Cornish Bakery turn their noses up at the Gunpowder Lamb, a spicy meat wrap that Tom and Henry cook up – again, they say, not quite right for their customers.

Which is not to say they received negative reviews all round. You only have to look at the faces of the owners of The Kitchen @ Tower, next to the Tower of London, to see how well the boys’ Beefeater Burger went down.

But these recipes are a long way from the boys’ own businesses: upmarket butcher’s and bakery shops next  door to each other in the small Gloucestershire town of Chipping Sodbury. In Tom’s bakery, Hobbs House, one particular sourdough loaf sells for £13 apiece, while Henry’s butcher supplies only free-range meat.

Tom, 35, and Henry, 25, have five children between them and four other siblings. The entire Herbert family is underpinned by traditional family values.

There aren’t many companies that publicly proclaim, as the boys’ father Trevor does on the Hobbs House website, that their success is down to ‘a strongly held Christian faith, a happy marriage and six children’.

These recipes are a long way from the boys' own businesses: upmarket butcher's and bakery shops next door to each other in the small Gloucestershire town of Chipping Sodbury

Henry recalls a Boys’ Own childhood of tree-houses and lighting fires, but they also saw the realities of country life: they both recall watching animals being slaughtered in the family abattoir. ‘We’d go and watch it over the stable door,’ says Tom. ‘I must have been six or seven. I totally understood the process – two of my uncles were farmers.’

Is the ending of an animal’s life a suitable spectator sport for a primary school child? They both believe emphatically that it is. ‘It’s important to know when you eat a steak that it came from a live animal – and that animal needs to be treated with the utmost respect.’

The problem was that Babs and Len – and their customers – didn’t respect the meaty choice Tom and Henry served up for them. The Blackpool Breakfast Bap, with its suspicious seeds, was vetoed in place of a cake with sparklers, garishly coloured sweets and a model of the Blackpool Tower.

Its secret ingredient? Crushed up Blackpool rock. Try selling that in the Cotswolds!

The Fabulous Baker Brothers, Tuesday, 9pm, More4. Their book, Glorious British Grub, is published by Headline on 28 February, priced £20.