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Pete’s Eats, the famous climbers’ cafe in the heart of Eryri (Snowdonia), reopened this summer after almost three years of being shuttered. The newly minted version is a swish affair, with a copper-topped bar, distressed wood panels, local craft beers, tacos and a handsome crew of young locals in branded T-shirts. A lot of money has clearly been spent on the refurb, and it seems to be at the forefront of a new wave of developments in the historic village of Llanberis.
When Pete Norton and his wife Victoria opened a cafe here in 1978, they envisioned a refuge for climbers, hillwalkers and anyone else who was hungry after a day out on the hills of Eryri. Rain-lashed visitors stumbling in from a long hike could look forward to pint mugs of tea poured from a metal teapot the size of a rhino’s skull, huge plates of steaming chilli and vegetable curry on brown rice, an all-day breakfast or mountainous chip butties.
The walls were adorned with black-and-white photos of local crags featuring the UK’s wildest climbers of the day: Andy Pollitt on Lord of the Flies at Dinas Cromlech; Al Harris looking louche on the precipitous cliffs of A Dream of White Horses on Gogarth; John Redhead on the Rainbow Slab in the Dinorwic slate quarries.
In the 1980s, Llanberis Pass drew the best climbers from all over the world, and Pete’s Eats was the greasy-spoon temple that welcomed them all. I misspent much of my youth huddled in the window seats next to the jukebox, which rattled out the Kinks’ Sunny Afternoon in counterpoint to the rain hammering at the windows. Every so often wild-eyed, sinewy figures would stumble through the door in a cloud of chalk dust and request the Route Book – the mythical ledger of new climbs where local rock stars would map out and christen their latest conquests.
Pete’s Eats came under new ownership in 2018, struggled after the Covid 19 lockdowns and closed for renovations in September 2022. It showed no sign of reopening – a sad sight in a village where it occupies a central position.
But in 2024, local entrepreneur Nick Pritchard stepped in to save Pete’s. “We had to do something. I love Llanberis and I’ve watched it struggle year by year because visitors bypassed the village as there was so little on offer in terms of food and drink,” he says. The cafe reopened in July.
While you can still buy the pints of tea that were a trademark of the original Pete’s Eats, the menu also now features cosmopolitan cafe fare such as smashed avocado and eggs benedict alongside the full Welsh breakfast. The staff bring a lot of energy to the place, and you get the feeling there’s a palpable will to make this a success, to make it their own. It’s setting a standard just by existing, especially at a time when local pubs, including the ones left in the village, are still recovering from the aftershock of lockdown.
The post office has long since closed as has the much-loved Morris Bros bakery. The Padarn Hotel bar was the night-time mirror of Pete’s Eats – when the cafe switched off its lights of an evening everyone meandered down the high street and into the Pad. On a Friday and Saturday night you could barely move. The Pad is still popular with tourists, but the riotous Saturday nights have now switched to the village-owned social club Yr Ddraig, a hugely successful bar and venue that regularly hosts live Welsh-language bands, drag acts and Elvis impersonators.
The turning point for villages like Llanberis came when holidaymakers who once flocked to Greece, Spain or the Canary Islands began to lean into the idea of a post-Covid staycation. Soon, the usual array of hillwalkers and outdoor enthusiasts were joined by a phalanx of Instagram explorers seeking out mythical backdrops to boost their posts. Almost overnight, social media sent local tourism into hyperspace.
Eryri is one of the most Instagram-friendly national parks due to the incredible diversity in a relatively small region. It’s also one of the most filmic: Willow (1988) and Clash of the Titans (2010) were partly filmed here. Then there was the 2019 TV series The Witcher, and for two months this year whole sections of Dinorwig quarry were sealed off when an HBO crew set up camp to film the third season of House of the Dragon.
Dinorwig quarry has been a world heritage site since 2021, a testament to the men who worked and often died there extracting 500-million-year-old slate. There are dedicated viewing points, but the fences that were erected to keep people away from the treacherous holes and pathways have been cut.
Visitors flock here to try to find a secret waterfall, a primordial cascade surrounded by ferns that’s pure Tolkien. Last Easter thousands of people swarmed here, with Wales Online blasting that “TikTok over-tourism leaves Gwynedd village besieged”.
Slate may not sound like something that will get your teenage kids’ pulses racing, but the National Slate Museum in Llanberis is an atmospheric place where you can almost feel the ghosts of quarrymen move around you, and an ongoing £21m renovation of the attraction will probably further boost tourism to the village.
In keeping with Llanberis’s adrenaline-fuelled heritage, newer events such as the Ultra-Trail Snowdonia, which started in 2018, have also helped boost visitor numbers. While the finishing touches were being added to Pete’s Eats in mid-June, the village hosted thousands of runners from across the globe competing in four mind-bogglingly hard mountain races that range in distance from 25K to 100 miles. The tagline for the race is “Beautiful beyond belief, savage beyond reason”.
Then in mid-July, the annual Ras Yr Wyddfa celebrated its 50th iteration. The race to the summit of the mountain follows the Llanberis Path and back down again. It’s one of the busiest paths on the mountain and runners have to weave through hikers, dogs on extendable leads and selfie-taking groups of charity walkers in matching T-shirts. You win this race by ignoring the laws of physics and placing your faith in the mountain gods by sprinting downhill as fast as you can on ankle-shattering gradients that absolutely want to kill you.
Like Pete’s, Ras Yr Wyddfa has become an institution. Managed and organised by local businesses and a team of dedicated volunteers, it attracts hundreds of athletes from around the world.
The young team in Pete’s Eats has had a busy summer. When I mention to one of the staff that the place was so different back in the day, they nod wryly. “Lots of people have been telling us that. They can’t understand why we don’t have the same menu as before. But most people love it, and nowadays you can get a chilled glass of pinot grigio if you don’t fancy a pint of tea.”
They’re right, the cafe has adapted, and the village is the better for it. Much as I loved the spit and sawdust of the old Pete’s, the climbers have changed, the tourists have changed, and I’m reliably informed by my daughter that kids don’t eat chip butties any more.
