The entrance is up a little lane from the centre of the village, its a little bit hard to find as it it isn't very clearly signed. You approach the cottage containing the tea room through a lovely country garden. Even at the start of December it looked pretty, in the summer I bet this place is amazing.
As it was freezing cold we got a table inside. The tea room decor is total frippery. There are ribbons tied to the chairs and menus, mismatched vases and tea-light holders, twee pictures and ornaments and proper willow pattern teacups and saucers.
On the menu there is a choice of salads, jacket potatoes and plough mans lunches, but we had gone for the afternoon tea and that only!
The price is £12 (or £10 each if 2 of you order). For this you get bottomless tea or coffee, a selection of sandwiches, a scone with jam and cream and a piece of fruitcake and cheese.
The food was served on a proper tiered stand. Seeing this galvanised my feeling that tea served any other way is fundamentally just a little bit wrong.
We got extra sandwiches for free as it was fairly quiet and the waitress said we may as well have them to save them from going to waste. Bonus!
Sandwiches contained tuna, cream cheese and cucumber, roast chicken and ham. All really nice.
The scones were huge and came in a choice of plain, fruit or chocolate (controversial I know). James had the chocolate scone just to prove how good it was. It contained lumps of milk chocolate in place of the fruit and chocolate spread in place of the jam. To be fair it was bloomin delicious! The fruit scone was PERFECT and the jam tasted home made.
The were no fancy little cakes, instead a big slice of home made fruit cake topped with cheese. This I actually couldn't finish as there was so much food!
The service was really friendly and quite attentive.
This to me epitomises what afternoon tea should be: frivolous, quaint and completely lovely.
As you may have seen in the previous post, I have developed a new score for rating afternoon tea... the 'T factor':
Score out of 20/Price in £
The scores:
Ambiance: Frivolous and delightful (although apparently often very busy)5/5
Service: Very good 4/5
Presentation: 5/5
Food quality: Generally lovely with a perfect scone 5/5
Price £10 each (with 2 eating)
Total = 19 % 10 = T factor of 1.9
The Tea Gardens
(I love this address)
Off High Street,
Off Woodlands Lane,
Behind the Post Office,
South Milford
LS25 5AF
01977 682979
Website
5 comments:
That looks amazing! What's the cheese on the fruit cake, it looks blue in the photo?
It tasted like Wensleydale, I think with cranberries in it. It was a really good, had a lovely time :)
Looks lovely!
One sunny summer afternoon, about eight of us dropped into this place for the final snack stop of a 80 mile cycle ride.
The posh people with the yappy lap dogs were wearing collars and ties even on a Sunday, so we didn't exactly fit in, but the place was very happy to accommodate us.
Even the sugar bowl was tied up in pink spotted lace, and we really weren't sure whether we had to tie it back up afterwards!
More the place to take your Aunt than your cycling buddies ...
Ah, was this why we were talking about afternoon tea the other day?
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