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| - Lovely environment, and a nice afternoon tea service. I didn't love ALL the mini sandwiches and cakes, but the selection was quite large.
The darjeeling from the royal collection is delicious. Can't go wrong with a classic tea like that! I initially ordered the lapsang souchong to try and didn't enjoy it - it smelled very smokey and tasted kind of like bacon tea, which is not as good as it sounds. :P Our kind server offered to switch it for me and I was much happier with the super fragrant darjeeling. I tend to stick to classic teas - blacks teas or earl greys - because I have plenty of Chinese and Japanese teas at home, and if I wanted to have some funky, trendy, "creatively-flavoured" tea, I could just go to DavidsTea. So I'd recommend going for a classic at hotel tea services.
The gravlax sandwich was good, and the roast beef was also alright. The shrimp spread could have used more flavour and I wish they gave us more toast to eat it with, considering how much spread we were given! It tasted kind of like eating soft but solid butter, actually, because it's basically just shrimp cooked in clarified butter.
I dislike marzipan but enjoyed most of the cakes - I just peeled the marzipan off the two that came with it. My favourite cake was the banana toffee loaf. But the best things in the whole tea service were the scones!!! They were so fresh and buttery and fluffy and they smelled SO GOOD. I wish there were more/fancier jams to eat them with! Cream was nice and fresh, too.
Service was also very good. Table was very small for all the stuff we ordered, but the old-fashioned armchairs were comfortable.
I took Superwoman here for her birthday, and she really loved the "royal" aspect of the tea - the fact that a former British royal chef put this together and that there was information about who in the royal family likes what item(s) from the menu...we were born in a British colony, after all.
The tea service also comes with a tour of the rooftop garden and some other parts of the hotel, though we didn't participate because we were pressed for time - we had a movie to go to. It was kind of odd that they came around with waiver forms if you wanted to go on the tour but I suppose they have those based on experience!
It was a very nice experience over all.
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