Chocolate City: How York Earned Its Sweet Tooth, and Where to Eat Now

Manchester had cotton, Sheffield had steel, and York had chocolate. Two Quaker families built the industry: the Rowntrees, whose factory north of the centre invented the KitKat in 1935 and made Smarties, Aero and Fruit Pastilles, and the Terrys, who gave the world the Chocolate Orange. At its height the industry employed more people in York than anything else, and it never entirely left; Nestlé still makes KitKats in the city today. Two attractions tell the story from different angles: York's Chocolate Story on King's Square runs guided tours with tastings (£21 adults at the time of writing), while York Cocoa Works on Castlegate is a working chocolate factory with a cafe, a shop and bookable bar-making workshops, which is the one to choose if you would rather make chocolate than hear about it.

The famous queue

Bettys Café Tea Rooms has stood on St Helen's Square since 1936, part of the Yorkshire family firm founded in 1919 by a Swiss confectioner, and the menu still runs Swiss and Yorkshire in parallel: rösti one line, rarebit the next, and the Fat Rascal fruit scone as the signature bake. The queue out of the door is part of the ritual and moves faster than it looks; most seating is walk-in, though the Lady Betty afternoon tea in the Belmont Suite books ahead, Thursday to Sunday. Locals will also point you to the smaller Stonegate branch, which is quieter, or tell you, with some pride, that they only go at Christmas.

The serious end

York's restaurant scene has climbed sharply in the last decade, and the top of it is genuinely national-class. Roots, Tommy Banks's restaurant on Marygate, holds a Michelin star for tasting menus cooked almost entirely from the Banks family farm at Oldstead: a Core menu at £110, a Signature at £165, and a more affordable Sunday Feast from £75. It is small, runs Wednesday to Sunday, and books out well ahead. Skosh, Neil Bentinck's small-plates room on Micklegate, holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and is arguably the harder table to get: contemporary British cooking with an international reach, served as snacks and plates at a kitchen-facing counter and tables, Wednesday to Sunday. Reservations need card details, which tells you how contested the seats are.

Two more deserve their bookings. Melton's on Scarcroft Road, near the Bishy Road shopping strip, has been run by Michael and Lucy Hjort for decades: modern British with two AA Rosettes, a wine list of over 120 bins, and the settled confidence of a neighbourhood restaurant that has nothing to prove. The Star Inn The City, Andrew Pern's brasserie in the 1784 Lendal Engine House beside Museum Gardens, is the riverside option, with a terrace on the Ouse and Yorkshire produce through the menu; tables book through OpenTable, and drinks are walk-in only.

Cheap, good and local

The best-value eating in the walled city is the Shambles Market food court, thirty-odd stalls open daily, where Los Moros, the North African kitchen that grew from a stall into a Grape Lane restaurant, still trades every day from 11:30 to 5. The restaurant itself is small, candlelit and books by phone; the stall is the fast route to the same charcoal-grilled flavours. Partisan on Micklegate covers the daytime shift: an art-filled room, from-scratch brunch and lunch, kitchen closing at 2:30pm, and, unusually for a brunch spot this popular, bookable tables.

Two pubs that are also monuments

Finally, drink somewhere with a date on it. The House of the Trembling Madness at 48 Stonegate serves craft beer and hearty plates in a candlelit hall inside part of a Norman house of about 1180, above its own specialist beer shop; no bookings, share a table. The Blue Bell on Fossgate is York's smallest pub, licensed since 1798 with an Edwardian interior untouched since 1903, five cask ales, and house rules, no music, no phones at the bar, no large groups, that have kept it civilised for over a century. It turns people away when full, which is often, so go early on a weekday and count yourself lucky.