Brown’s Hotel- Afternoon Tea- London, England

Afternoon Tea is wonderful British tradition.  It is an early evening meal usually eaten between 2 and 5pm. We had our afternoon tea at 2 pm at Brown’s Hotel on Albemarle St. You have to make a reservation at Brown’s because it is one of the more popular places to have tea (P.S that is an infinitive phrase).  Brown’s hotel is mommy’s favorite place to have tea.  The server said that some actor named Pierce Brosnan and a King of some country have both eaten at Brown’s.  It is a very OLD (Karsen prefers the word historic) hotel and feels very lah-di-dah; you will feel like you have been transported into a luxurious world.  Now, even though we are not famous, we can add the sophisti-kids to that list!

Let us give you a sneak-peak into the luxury of afternoon tea at Brown’s. Two sofas on either side of a longish table with live piano music playing in the background. The smell of chocolate and tea-oh so many kinds of tea-silver needle, red hibiscus, earl grey-to the simplest and the most complex! An assortment of sandwiches arrayed in perfect patterns on each cart, scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam! And to top that off, chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, cakes, tarts, and battenburg cake!

Here is a picture of Anya and Bhuya at afternoon tea (this is Bhuya’s debut on our blog – she has been waiting to become famous!).

Three-Quarters of the menu consisted of a variety of teas. Food was described on only two pages. Because we are not really interested in teas – we would consider this menu ALMOST the most boring menu EVER (the most boring menu is no menu at all. Can you imagine?!!?!! No menu at all???!!?! OUTRAGEOUS!!!! THIS COULD CREATE AN OUTCRY!!!!!! A REBELLION!! Sorry, I think we had too many desserts at Brown’s. Excuse us).  To spare you the boredom, we are presenting only the REMOTELY interesting parts of the menu.

Unfortunately, we (the sophisti-kids) have not developed a taste for tea yet.  In fact, we’ve tried tea and think it tastes like dirty water.  Luckily for us, there is an alternative. We ordered two hot chocolates which could possibly be the best hot chocolate we have ever had!! (Karsen says “duh”[“Hush up Karsen”]). First, they poured fresh hot chocolate in a teacup, then hot milk. They gave us chocolate and milk on the side for topping our cup off. Here is a video of “How to Make Perfect Hot Chocolate: A Demonstration (A little note:  the hot chocolate takes much longer to prepare than tea because Brown’s hotel makes it from scratch.  They actually use a block of chocolate and melt it on the stove.  Please feel free to try at home):

HIGH TEA-HOT CHOCOLATE

Just for Mr. Don (who tells us that we should always drink from teacups with our pinkies up) – here are some pictures of us with their pinky up enjoying the smooth, “much-better-than-tea-alternative”  hot chocolate.

As we mentioned earlier, Brown’s Hotel is the epitome of luxury.  To give you an idea of how luxurious, Here are a pictures of the fancy silver tea pots and fancy china teacups:

High tea usually comes with these lovely trays of all-you-can-eat sandwiches, scones, and sweets.  The bottom tray was full of sandwiches.  The middle tray was full of scones (two kinds – with raisins and without) and it remains covered with a white cloth to stay nice and warm.  The top tray had delicious sweets.  Brown’s Hotel designed special sweets for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.  From a kids perspective, the sweets are the most tempting but Mommy said that we needed to start with the bottom tray and work up – it’s the proper way to have tea.

So we tried the variety of sandwiches (which were all absolutely delicious by the way), including GUESS WHAT?? A CORONATION CHICKEN SANDWICH!!!! (For those of you who don’t know – and we didn’t until this trip – coronation chicken was a dish developed for the Queen many years ago.  It is usually served cold and has a sweet curry taste, mixed with sultanas.  In the form of a sandwich, it is at least 3 times better than chicken coronation ice cream!!).   Even though all of the sandwiches were tasty, all of us were attracted to different flavors.  Sujata Bhuya’s favorite was the egg sandwich that was everyone else’s LEAST favorite. Our favorite was the smoked salmon sandwich. Kaushik Pufaji liked the roast beef sandwich – it came with just a hint of mild horseradish. Mommy liked the coronation chicken, and Papa was neutral (HOW CAN THIS BE?????)

Soon afterwards, we polished of the scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam. BUT.. the best combination is clotted cream and jam.(GASP!) Here is a picture of the scones.

Then, we had DESSERT! I’m not sure what the usual desserts are but these were specially made for the Queen’s Jubilee.  The battenburg cake was by far superior to all the other cakes. Battenburg cake is sponge cake with a two by two criss cross pattern alternating from pink to yellow.  This colorful cake is then surrounded by marzipan!  We love marzipan!!!  Tied for second was a raspberry tart and a chocolate tart. Here is a picture of the entire cart of food and a video of our server explaining the food on the cart-(P.S if you run out they always give you refills right away of whatever you need or want). In addition, if you are a vegetarian, you can order vegetarian sandwiches which Sujata Bhuya was very pleased about.

HIGH TEA-SANDWICHES MOVIE

And after we finished eating, the servers offered two additional kinds of cake!  One was a fruit cake and the other was a sponge cake with jam and cream.  Sorry – we were so eager to eat cake that we forgot to take pictures!!

Overall, we enjoyed all of the food and the hot chocolate!  Because we were allowed unlimited refills, we stuffed ourselves silly and didn’t have dinner!!  In fact, we ate for more than 2 hours – it was so relaxing on the sofa!!!  If you are ever in London, we highly recommend experiencing afternoon tea.  And of all of the places we’ve been for tea, we adore Brown’s Hotel.  It is less crowded than Harrod’s, the Ritz, or Fortnum and Mason’s and we like the food here best!  We would rate Brown’s afternoon tea

4 1/2 smiley faces (out of 4 1/2 smiley faces)

😀 😀 😀 😀  1/2

Cheers!

-the sophisti-kids

p.s.  we downgraded Brown’s from 5 smiley faces to 4 1/2 smiley faces only after our Lanesborough Tea Posting.