Tea at the Huntington Library
As part of my birthday weekend celebration, Lorenzo made a reserveration at the Tea Room in the Huntington Library. Their gardens are amazing. We only visited four areas (so a return trip is a most): the Japanese Garden, the Chinese Garden, the Rose Garden, and the Conservatory. One of the highlights, I must say, is actually seeing rows of Camellia Sinensis, I am assuming, var sinensis – since they are right between the Japanese and Chinese Garden – tea plants! After all our tea adventures, we finally get to see the source of the matter, well how the plant can look like. In retrospect, the ones in Huntington Library were a tad dusty and darkish green, unlike the ones seen here, here, and here. To be fair, those are pictures from people who actually travel where tea is cultivated while the shrubs in the Huntington Library are for the amusement of those who recognize the name on the little placards on the ground. Still, they were the very first tea shrubs I ever laid my eyes on, and so they were all quite beautiful to me.
Now to the heart of the matter, a review of the Huntington Library’s Tea Room. Appearance-wise, the tea room is quite quaint – a relatively small & busy restaurant situated in a most romantic spot, at the heart of the Rose Garden. Once seated, you are served a basket of scones and a pot of the house’s special blend of black tea with strawberry and kiwi. Though I suspected that they do not have a tea menu, I was still a little bit disappointed when we learned that they only serve one kind of tea. Fortunately, all disappointment went away with the first cup of tea. The aroma was startling sweet and comforting – it smelled of warm biscuits with jam. The taste was also very sweet and smooth. It does not rank as one of the great teas I’ve tasted. But the tea was still all together pleasing, and paired well with the scones and finger sandwiches. I did enjoy their scones very much and must have eaten more than I should have. They are also quite generous in refilling your basket and letting you take the rest home. Their scones come in several flavours – the ones we got were: blueberry, cranberry, cinnamon, and cheddar. Though I really like their scones, I think the best scones I’ve had were the ones we ate at The Rose, a tea room in Oxford, England, for various reasons that will be explained in future posts.
Now, no afternoon tea, especially one that aspires to be a traditional English Afternoon Tea, is complete without finger sandwiches and little cakes & other desserts. The Huntington Library’s Tea Room of course provided these, as well. They are served in buffet style. The finger sandwiches were good. I did not get a chance to really sample their cakes and other desserts because of the scones. It’s amazing how little finger foods with lots of tea can stuff you to the brim. And so, at some point I had to draw the line on the cakes, though that did make me a little sad. What would I give for a second stomach when visiting tea rooms.
Overall, it was a wonderful tea experience. Our server was awfully sweet and changed our teapot three times throughout our stay to make sure we always had a fresh, hot pot of tea. They offer their house tea blend for sale on the way out. It was tempting, but as shown in my previous post, I have quite a lot of tea to get through and so I’m trying to limit my tea purchases, for the meantime, to those that are extremely irresistible. In particular, that black oolong our tea lady recently brought back from Taiwan that she only has 9 little packets left.
On a sidenote, while visiting the Chinese Garden, we found out that they also have a tea house as part of the main structure that surrounds the Chinese Garden. Unfortunately, the tea house was closed when we got there. And from what we could see, they have some interesting tea selection that we definitely must try whenever we return to the Huntington Library.
A Cup of Delightful Tea 