Bo K.
Yelp
I believe that an afternoon tea party should be an experience, and we sure had quite an experience here...just not what we expected. Overall, I would summarize it as confusing. Probably not the first word you want to describe high tea.
We were a party of 8 with a couple guests having dietary restrictions. Our setup had two tables, one larger round table and a smaller square table. After we were seated, one of the staff came by and was immediately flustered, which made us all feel like we had done something wrong? After some muttering, she walked away. A few minutes later, another lady came by and asked about the dietary restrictions. We clarified who was allergic to seafood, who was vegetarian, etc. This lady then also became flustered. She took a big breath and then said, "okay, this is not what we intended but we will make it work, okay, this is going to be okay". Please consider that at this point we still have no idea what we did or didn't do correctly. Turns out, they wanted the couple of people with dietary restrictions to sit at the small square table. I'm not sure how we were supposed to know that or why it matters, but it turned out to be a big deal to the staff. I will say that they were accommodating about the restrictions and explained the modifications clearly. But they made those people all feel bad about their food allergies/restrictions.
When it came to choosing our teas, the staff seemed annoyed with us asking any questions and was curt about us choosing two teas because more would take more time. So we discussed as a group and when we ordered the two, she asked if that was it, which then confused us because we thought we could only order two. Turns out we could order up to four - which we did up end up doing - and they mentioned a few more times how that was going to take a much longer time to serve. The teas were nice - I did like the variety we chose. Another point to note about the teas was that they seemed very particular about where the teapots were placed - on the candle burners at all times, but take them off when empty. Seemed simple enough for us to understand but they were insistent about reminding us anyway. There was a lot of sighing when they came by our table and a lot of muttering.
Now the food. Overall, fairly standard. I liked the sandwiches the most, but they were not made with the highest finesse (nor do I expect them to be!). Scones were on the dry side but good with the cream they came with. I did find a piece of plastic in one of them. Most of the party really enjoyed the brownies. The whipped mousse thing, however, was very sweet and rich. One lick was great, the whole glass was too much. As we chatted and dined, we couldn't help but noticed that a staff was glancing at our party often. We tried not to think much about it, but eventually she came over and asked us what was wrong. We said nothing, and she asked us why we were not eating. We said we were just enjoying each other's company and were eating. The staff then told us essentially we were eating too slowly, which made them think we don't like the food, which makes them very sad - she said when they have leftover food from guests, they sometimes cry about it and wonder what went wrong. We felt very bad but also very awkward about the entire encounter. The piece of plastic in scone came later and we decided not to even confront them about it (which I feel is wrong but somehow we felt guilty about taking the experience slow and eating at our comfortable paces so didn't want to cause any more trouble?)
Our party was tucked away towards the back of the restaurant and it was extremely warm. Even though all of us were in dresses, we were sweating. Behind us was a closet of some sort and throughout service, the door would swing open. It made some of us jump the first few times it happened. One of the staff would come by and close the door again and one of the times, she said "sorry about that, it's just the darn ghosts". Maybe funny? Maybe creepy? Wasn't sure what our appropriate reaction should have been so it was more of a nervous laugh.
I'm not sure if maybe we missed the charm, but this was not the experience any of us thought we would be having or would want to have again. I felt uncomfortable and unwanted during most of the time we spent here, like we were an inconvenience to the staff from the moment we walked in. We were never loud or disrespectful in any way but treated like we were disruptive.