Garden Court at the Palace Hotel
Tea: ☕️ ☕ ☕ ☕
Food: 🍰 🍰 🍰 🍰
Ambience: 🌸 🌸 🌸 🌸 🌸
Overall rating: 💖 💖 💖 💖
Tags: english, elegant, formal
The most striking feature of the Garden Court at the Palace Hotel is its translucent glass roof. At tea time, the sun filters through just enough to give the room a warm glow that renders the light from the crystal chandeliers irrelevant. Marble columns and gilded details add to the grandeur and fire the imagination. Marissa, who works nearby, likes to come here on her lunch hour to read Edith Wharton novels, and Tom suggested we return for another tea on a rainy day, just to hear the soothing sound of rain hitting the glass.
Still, there are clues that this is the 21st century and not the Gilded Age after all: while the creamer and sugar bowl were antique silver, the other elements of the table settings were modern (white china, sleek silverware, glass plates). The furnishings are understated, and the tea-time harpist’s repertoire is heavy on the Andrew Lloyd Webber. The servers were friendly and prompt without obsequiousness, making sure our table had everything we needed.
We were generally impressed by the quality of the teas. Our black tea selections were the Legacy Blend (ceylon with strong notes of vanilla, bergamot, and rose), the Golden Assam (a heartier choice), and the Masala Chai (a wintry blend of spices). The Health and Well-Being first-flush green tea proved wonderfully crisp, and the Jasmine White Tea had a fresh, focused flavor. The Nobo Whole Fruit Tea was an explosion of berries, while the Vanilla Rooibos was heavy on the vanilla and light on the rooibos.
We ran into many of our usual logistical problems. The teapots were all identical and unlabeled, making it difficult to locate the teas we wanted. The leaves were left in removable strainers in the pots, introducing the dangerous possibility of over-steeping. We had to re-purpose our dessert plates as repositories for the used strainers, an imperfect solution that led to some unintentional cream notes in one of the teas later on in the service. Refills came promptly, but only refreshed the hot water and not the tea itself, so many of the teas were weak by the third and fourth brewings.
Savories included the usual cucumber sandwich (with spinach mousse holding on the impossibly thin slices of cucumber), an asparagus sandwich (with both green and white varieties), a conventional egg salad sandwich, a pastry puff with ham mousse, and smoked salmon with horseradish on pumpernickel. All were delicious, with the smoked salmon and the ham as the standouts. However, as with other hotel teas we’ve been to, we wished for a greater relative quantity of savory food to balance out the ample selection of sweets.
The dessert étagère arrived with two varieties of fluffy scones on the bottom: buttermilk and apricot. Topping options included tasty apricot compote, “clotted cream” that was really whipped butter, and overly sweet lemon curd. The top two tiers were filled with mango mousse cups (too much sugar, not enough mango), lemon bars (commendably tart, though still not enough for our most citrus-loving members), raspberry cheesecake bites (small and rich), Opéra cake squares (not overwhelmingly coffee-flavored, which pleased our coffee-averse members), and chocolate-dipped strawberries (perfect, of course). The gratuitous use of decorative edible gold complemented the Palace’s overall impression of richness and grandeur. Hmm, maybe this really is the Gilded Age.
Note: We attended the Palace Hotel tea and drafted this review before the ongoing Marriott Hotel workers’ strike (which includes the Palace) began in early October. H.A.T.S. does not endorse crossing picket lines in pursuit of tea.
Date attended: September 22, 2018
Attendees: Erica, Hannah, Ilana, Jasmine, Marissa & Tom
Price/seat: $68 (Signature Tea)
Location: 2 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco
Menu: www.sfpalace.com/garden-court
