When I was out in San Francisco my mom thought it would be awesome to take me, my Grandmother, her BFF and my BFF out to High Tea at the Palace Hotel. It was really fun and I did my best to record it with the video feature of my camera so maybe the sound quality isn’t great but my hair is awesome.
You should know I call her Spunky and she calls me Groovy and that’s because we met as Girl Scout camp counselors when we were 19.
Me, my mom and Grandmother.
Mom and Linda.
In sum, the Palace Hotel High Tea relies heavily on ambience and bells and whistles and their tea is good but it isn’t all that. Their teas could be better served and blended, but the whole menu and concept is pretty great. They should hire a tea snob like me to come in and shape them up. It’s not cheap at $45 a pop, but it was a really great experience and I say if you’re visiting from out of town or you have a crowd of family in from out of town it would be really worth it.
The menu. I agonized over what to choose and ultimately went with things I knew I wouldn’t be able to get other places, because the blends seemed vague enough to be proprietary or at least specific to the Palace Hotel. I had the Palace Blend (a black tea blend]* and the Equilibrium tea (a chamomile and “magical herbs” blend]. Both were okay but could have been better.
The video includes lots of great shots of the Palace Hotel atrium. It also inspired me to invest in a good vintage tea pot and start collecting vintage tea cups and saucers. I’d love to have a set that’s very hodge podge and beautiful. My roommate has a bunch but it makes me nervous to use her tea stuff because it’s all vintage and I don’t want to break it.
It was really special to get to do this with my mom and that she was able to do this for us. Growing up poor and working class you don’t really think you’re going to get to be fancy or affluent enough to do something like high tea at the Palace Hotel. And it’s not something I take for granted now, getting to get dressed up and do high tea. I also had to do a lot of work on myself to feel worthy of opportunities like this, but that’s like a whole book topic and not for a tiny post introducing tiny sandwiches.
Tiny sandwiches!
THANKS MOM!
*Please excuse the weird close parenthesis. My Macbook key board is starting to fail and the shift key is being wonky and some keys just don’t work. Getting a new usb keyboard soon.