The Tea Room

Finding a venue for afternoon tea in Australia is something of a challenge. You can find many Australian variants where cocktails replace tea and petit fours replace scones but I can’t help feeling that nationalistic fervour has thrown the baby out with the bathwater in these cases. It’s a little like Eggs Benedict – when you have something perfectly formed why mess with it? Yes, afternoon tea is a quintessentially English tradition but aren’t we established enough as a nation these days to embrace our food heritage without shame and without feeling the need to reinvent the wheel? But I digress...

In our search we did come across the very swanky website for the Tea Room which showed enticing pictures of giant scones and traditional tea stands. We both adore the Queen Victoria Building as an example of late Victorian architecture and decided to treat ourselves to an afternoon tea in opulent surroundings.

To focus on the positives first – we were ushered into a large, high ceilinged room and offered a wide selection of loose leaf teas, including a “connoisseurs” selection that tempted us both. I went for a Classic English blend which was smooth and full flavoured and my partner chose a Darjeeling Summer which was very aromatic and intense. These were served in small silver tea pots with a silver milk jug and strainer on the side. I missed the lovely paper handles the Peninsula Hotel staff put on their teapots but the effect looked very classy and the tea tasted very good indeed. One small note is that the milk and the jug had obviously been sitting in a fridge somewhere as both were very cold – I am not convinced that such freezing milk was a good addition to such superior tea.

Our tea tray arrived hot on the heels of the tea itself and it looked suitably impressive with some enormous scones on the bottom tier along with a (somewhat incongruous) spinach filo pastry, a nice looking selection of pastries on the middle layer and a few sandwiches and a polenta tart each on top. The scones had arrived warm so we started at the bottom before they cooled off.

I have to say that these scones were a big disappointment. Yes, they were large, and yes they were warm but in all other respects they were dry and tasteless. The cream wasn’t clotted but I might have overlooked that for a good scone. I left some of mine uneaten which is something I think my partner had never witnessed in all our travels - a testament to my disappointment. I find scones so easy to make (and make well) that it baffles me how a tea room can get it so very wrong. Perhaps these scones were baked in the morning and then placed in a warming oven to stay warm (and dry into tasteless rock cakes). Who knows – but it wasn’t a good start.

The sandwiches were a little better. They were made with fresh bread and the egg sandwich was very tasty. However a liberal sprinkling of cayenne pepper had been added to the mix, and, although we both love chilli normally, my partner commented that it has no real place in an afternoon tea. On a plus note the spinach pastry and the mini polenta tart were both very good.

We soothed our cayenne assaulted palates with yet more of our very tasty tea and then hit the pastries layer. The macaroon was chewy and the miniature friand was tasteless and disappointing. The miniature chocolate mud cake however was dense and moist and deliciously chocolaty and the poppy-seed lemon cake was good too. There was also a delicious cream filled passion fruit melting moment. The final item was a pastry shell filled with some piped Chantilly cream and with a quarter of a strawberry on top. This was frankly not remotely up to par and was the sort of thing you could whip up as a homemade petit four if you had no time or desire to actually bake anything. When compared with the pastries at Mar Hall and the miniature strawberry tarts at places like the Savoy it was yet another disappointment.

Only an hour had passed yet we had consumed our tea tray and, as no-one had offered to refill our small tea pots, we were out of the tasty tea as well. We had never had an afternoon tea take so little time and both of us were left feeling disappointed. I think the room itself lacks a certain grandeur and style and the fact that we were seated at a normal table rather than lounging in comfortable sedans certainly didn’t help us relax. We also very much missed the live music we have had with other afternoon teas. We were instead offered some piped music of a rather dance club style which clashed with the attempt at a tea room style. The tea room at the QVB serves cocktails as well as tea and perhaps half of its problem is that it doesn’t know quite what to be. In their defence we did later see people refilling tea pots with hot water so we might have lingered longer over tea if we had chosen. But sadly, neither of us really felt like it.