As some of you may know, I have wanted to partake in a traditional afternoon tea for a long time. Thankfully, the hotel we are staying in offers a traditional afternoon tea and we were able to get reservations. The reservations were necessary to ensure that the Hacket Eatery had the items involved in a tea available, but not to reserve a space due to high demand. We were the only ones there for tea so had the whole place to ourselves (and our very attentive waiter).

Afternoon tea first started in England in the 1840s. Apparently, since dinner was generally served rather late, Anna Russell, the Duchess of Bedford, wanted to cure her “sinking feeling” between lunch and dinner. She decided to start inviting friends over for tea and some snacks and started this social tradition.

We could have considered it a romantic setting I guess, since we had a table setup just or us and it was looking out the windows at the gardens. Unfortunately for us short people, the view out the window was blocked by the small tree, outdoor table set and porch railing which disturbed the view. Although seeing the little sandwiches on “Bridgerton” did encourage my desire for “tea time”, we were surprised to find ourselves treated to the show’s renditions of 80’s & 90’s songs.

Our meal started with a cleansing lemon sorbet and we each were able to select a different tea to enjoy. We even had our tea with sugar and milk, which is now possibly my favorite way to have hot tea, We’ll see if it continues when we get home, but we’ll definitely have to buy the little sugar cubes! We then waited for our tower of delights! The menu showed that we would be getting the following.

And then the food came! It honestly all looked really good. We ended up eating several of the sandwiches, a scone, a bread, and then, only because we couldn’t get the pannacotta to go since it was in a shot glass, we had that as well. Honestly, we were both full. The rest was packaged up and came back to our room with us. Since we had our afternoon tea at 3pm, we’ll eat the desserts a bit later tonight.

All in all, I’d attend another afternoon tea, but maybe with a few more people as this was definitely too much food for two!