Tea anyone

By now everybody who knows me knows I love to go to tea. Saturday afternoon tea is a tradition. So, picture this …

Saturday, June 2, 2007 - me, my gran and my tea loving buddy Mary go to the infamous Bellevue at the Park Hyatt’s Ethel Barrymore Tea Room (now known as Café XIX). Haven’t been there in years because last year they closed shop for renovations - for well over 9 months - we were directed to the Ritz-Carlton for tea, but now the Ritz only has Sunday afternoon tea on weekends. So picture this …

Tea, mine and Mary's Mad Hatter – pomegranate, vanilla and passion fruit (sounds good right) - over-steeped and bitter (and the waitress said to me - in her uber thick French accent - “please let it steep a lil longer”).

Scones, muffins or biscuits you ask … only one, cranberry scones, and they were hard as rocks and dry as sand, so I coated them with Devonshire crème - I love Devonshire crème, love, love, love (LOL).

Sandwiches, open faced shrimp salad with way too much cilantro on rye – tasty; open faced cucumber sammy on soft rye with a thin spread of some kind of tomato based dressing – bland, bland, bland topped with chopped olives (how can olives be bland) oh well; open faced smoked salmon – well gran loves herself some smoked salmon, so she ate all 8 of them finger sammys – yes they gave us way to much smoked salmon (LOL); egg salad, delicious; and whitefish or some kind of fish (not tuna) on soft white bread - very tasty, but what kind of fish was that?

Desserts, what about the chocolate mouse – Mary handled all three of them and she ate the Lemon Curd with a spoon (LOL). And there were sugar cookies, mini mini lemon poppy drops; some kind of licorice cake drops and lets talk about the chocolate strawberries - well, I’m allergic to chocolate and gran doesn't eat anything "darker than her" (her words not mine), so the mutant strawberries dipped in the heavy coating of chocolate, I scraped the chocolate off and ate the strawberry and Mary ate the strawberry with the chocolate and washed it down with a glass of champagne. Nothing else can be said about desserts (LOL).

Report card please … tea was not good to me for the price (and M had champagne). I've had better for a lot less - a lot better and nothing was bitter or burnt or dry or crumbly like sand. And the topper, Mary left her favorite pair of eyeglasses and I "tried hard" to retrieve them. They didn't send the glasses to housekeeping (like the Assistant to the Executive Director of Housekeeping said), they didn't put the glasses up (in case we came rushing back), they tossed the glasses! That's right, tossed a pair of prescription eyeglasses. Can you believe that? Well, the Bellevue flunked, big time!

Next stop Gilbertsville ... Mary, get directions (LOL)! Will keep you posted.

Signing off with a "new" picture of Meme (isn't she adorable) ...