Afternoon Tea, Part One

From the Vault Dept.: Inspired by my voluble chronicle of my recent travels, here’s a throwback piece. It’s chronicles a delightful stop on a trip to London my wife and I took 36 years ago. The prices mentioned below are, of course, now only a nostalgic dream.

                                                                                                

THAT ELUSIVE FOURTH MEAL OF THE DAY, afternoon tea! What is its appeal and how should it be practiced? For an answer, my wife and I traveled to London with a vision of all traffic stopping and all shops closing down at 4 PM to enable visitors and residents to indulge in this custom.

It's not that dramatic. In fact, we came upon our high tea quite by accident, while visiting the place that's as much of a tourist attraction as it is a department store: Harrods, in the wealthy suburb of Knightsbridge.

A Rolls-Royce was parked outside. Behind it sat a Mercedes-Benz 560SL. Several other no doubt pedigreed, hyphenated cars followed. The doorman sported more buttons than an elevator in a high-rise.

Inside was a mixture of British restraint and American let's-sell-'em fervor (the sale was to begin in a week: “There's only one Harrods. There's only one sale”' is the tagline).

This is the Crossgates Mall of central London, assuming you stripped Crossgates of its more useless stores and jacked the prices at the rest. Admittedly, that eliminates over half the mall, but you get the idea. Lots of stuff, full retail price.

Lots of unusual stuff, too. You can buy a funeral service. There's also, and perhaps this is the wrong paragraph to mention it, a meat market.

And four restaurants on the upper two floors. It was about 3 o'clock when we made this discovery, along with learning that tea was about to served. We made our way through a labyrinth of floors and departments to the very top of the store, where the Georgian Room was a-bustle with the High Tea Crowd.

We missed the luncheon (or, if you're British, dinner) buffet, where £12 (about $19) buys you a plate to fill from the sprawling board of cold meats and salads – or, at the carvery section, hot roasts and Yorkshire pudding, the best reason I know for cooking roast beef.

Afternoon tea was a mere £5.50 ($8.80) – unless you want to sit on the porch with a view of London, and that's 50P extra.

Will it shock you to learn that those of our fellow-diners we could overhear were American? Probably the same throng that congregated a few blocks east to witness the changing of the guard that morning, a dead boring affair that only an American tourist would have the perseverance (and muscle power) to endure.

In any event, we were shown to a pink-clothed table in the midst of a huge room with skylights and an ornate ceiling, bounded by large panes of decoratively-frosted glass.

Yes, we said to the waiter's query, and he brought us a tray of three pots: tea, hot water, and milk. You thin the tea to your taste, you see, but remember, the milk gets poured first. [Note to younger self: That’s not absolutely true. Some insist that it the custom was born due to the erroneous fear that delicate teacups would crack from the hot liquid, although there’s an argument that milk-first prevents the milk itself from suffering from denatured proteins. And nobody wants that!]

Then we were turned loose upon the tables of sweets. They were breathtaking. Susan pounced on a pile of buttered scones (pronounced with a short O if you're British) before noticing the cream-filled confections, several of which she managed to cram onto the provided tiny plate.

The English don't use whipped cream as we know it. If you ask for cream for, say, your trifle, it's a thick but runny topping. In the confections we ate at Harrods, it was whipped just short of butter, flavored with a variety of essence.

Buffet tables were tumbling over with pastries, each a delectable morsel, each a hand-made item. There was fresh fruit as well, presented with breathtaking loveliness, although the two or, to be honest, three trips we took to the table were confined to a sampling of the breads and pastries.

Oh, yes. Bread. Freshly-baked, and a slice of sweet butter to make it a heavenly trip to the dinner hole.

We were surprised to notice how trim most of the Londoners were. When a fat body like mine emerged from a crowd it usually carried the vocal whine of a tourist from New Jersey. Perhaps there’s a deliberate avoidance of this sweet-laden afternoon tea that keeps the British in shape.  

The Georgian at Harrods, The Brompton Road, Knightsbridge, London SW1X 7XL, 020 7225 6800. Serving lunch and afternoon tea Mon-Sat noon-8, Sun noon-6. All major credit cards.

– Metroland Magazine, 23 July 1987