Last time I was in California, somehow it came up that my mom had never been to high tea. She said it wistfully - I could see her imagining herself in a pretty dress, in an elegant hotel ballroom, sipping tea with her daughters. So I took it upon myself to make some reservations for tea while I was here in CA. She seemed pretty excited about it. I'm such a good daughter.
Dressed in our summer-y finest, we headed out to San Francisco to have tea at the Fairmont Hotel. It was very old time-y and classic San Francisco.
They started us out with some pear-basil sorbet in a peanut brittle cup. It was quite refreshing (high tea makes you say things like "quite").
We each picked a tea, Darjeeling for my mom and the Fairmont Blend for me (I reasoned I should get something I couldn't get anywhere else). They served it in individual pots with those fancy little strainers.
Then they brought out a three tiered tray of sandwiches, scones and pastries. Who doesn't love that?
I couldn't quite fit the sandwiches in the picture - here they are again.
They were very flavorful for tea sandwiches - no bland cucumbers here. There was coconut chicken curry, rare slices of beef with watercress, crab salad on a corn muffin (really really good), smoked salmon pinwheels and goat cheese with sundried tomato tapenade (I love goat cheese).
The scones were excellent as well. You really can't have tea without scones. The best part about scones? You get to eat devonshire cream with them.
Yum! They also had lemon curd that my mom loved. I'm all about the cream though. We ate our little pastries (my mom liked the eclairs best, I preferred the madelines), took the rest home and called it a day (actually, we called it a massive traffic jam, thanks to a fire on Yerba Buena Island). But even being stuck in the car for two hours could not ruin our lovely day.
2 comments:
Quite good. Cheerio, luv. That tea looks spot on. Yes, quite.
hee hee
Ah, the memory of it all. It was a splendid afternoon. The best part was not the tea, or the scones, or the cute little sandwiches on three tiered plates. It was having time to sit uninterruptedly with my dear daughter and pass away the afternoon in mindful consumption of the joy of life! Many thanks!
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