Linda T.
Yelp
To be honest, my expectations were pretty low after reading the other Yelp reviews but my friend booked a reservation for her birthday so we went. This place is a little short of mediocre, based on my experience with other tea houses. As Paul Hollywood would say, this place is style over substance.
For a tea house, the tea selection is strangely limited. Sometimes that's ok if the tea is exceptional but it was more reminiscent of infused water, rather than tea. We gave it the benefit of the doubt and allowed the tea to steep. Even after an hour, there was very little taste. Our party ordered a variety ranging from white tea, green tea, black tea, to sencha. None of it was flavorful.
The place was cute and decorated but the vibes were lacking. I saw a lot of impeccably dressed parties celebrating birthdays and baby showers. However, the service was not there. The point of a place like this is to have a cute and fancy little afternoon. The server was very to the point. The menu was also poorly designed because you had to flip back and forth to find the tea options, tea sandwiches, and the scones.
The food itself was mixed. I ordered the English Afternoon Tea because I knew any other set would be too much. And the cost of splitting was prohibitive ($12-15 each when each set is $34-44?). The salad was salad (nothing to write home about), the fruit and cream was good (hard to screw up), and the scone was enormous (not proportionate to the rest of the set). Mine was nice and crispy but my friends said theirs was soggy. Especially soggy was my cream puff, which felt like it was plucked from one of the boxes you could purchase at Costco. My friend separately expressed the exact same sentiment! For my set, I was only able to choose one type of sandwich. I went with cranberry chicken, which was fine but as a whole the set seemed lacking. Two of my friends ordered the spicy salmon. If you were expecting something like lox, you will be disappointed because the salmon looks like it came out of a can. The tea bites were a pass for sure. My friend said the brownie was hard and she spat out the cheesecake. I'm not sure about the other desserts but they looked underwhelming.
The birthday girl received a mini bouquet, which was cute. It was a nice touch.