Mandarin Oriental

Be warned should you be anticipating a scone with your tea in America - you won't be getting the real thing. The American scone differs markedly from its English cousin. It is baked with a crust and is decidedly sweeter. In the case of our tea at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in San Francisco it was also filled with cranberries and golden raisins and some lemon zest. It was served with jam and, in itself, it was quite pleasant, but a traditional scone it was not and what is more it was served without any cream.

We noticed a few other variants in this, our first American afternoon tea. While champagne was offered with the tea, it wasn't served until the final tray of "sweets" were presented. Harmless enough I suppose but I tend to like having the champagne with my tea and sandwiches and scones at the beginning of afternoon tea rather than treating it as a dessert at the end of a light meal.

The Mandarin Oriental did offer a decent selection of very fine loose leaf teas. There was no English Breakfast tea on the menu but, when I asked, a loose leaf English Breakfast was duly produced. Long live Asian hotel chains and their appreciation of good tea!

We were given open sandwiches instead of finger sandwiches as in England. The bread was a little stale in the salmon sandwich but the cucumber sandwich was excellent.

The scones were as mentioned above (if they were simply called something else I wouldn't have minded at all!) We were also given "Russian tea cookies" which were tasty enough and seemed to consist mainly of hazelnuts.

The sweet tray was disappointing in that it contained none of the mini pastries we so adore, but only a few macaroons, some (unripe) strawberries dipped in chocolate (which, let's face it is hardly an impressive feat of culinary skill) and two quite tasty raspberry jelly squares. There were also a selection of chocolates that looked to have been lifted straight from a chocolate box. I had the impression the sweets tray was a combination of whatever sweets the hotel happened to have on hand. Certainly there was no evidence of a pastry chef being on site. Memories of Mar Hall eclairs followed our disappointed selves out into the cold San Francisco evening.