The Lounge at the Ritz-Carlton
Tea: ☕️ ☕ ️☕️ ️☕️
Food: 🍰 🍰 🍰 🍰
Ambience: 🌸 🌸 🌸 🌸
Overall rating: 💖 💖 💖 💖
Tags: elegant, modern, formal, english
Your reviewers could argue about whether “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” or “Puttin’ on the Ritz” was more perfect accompaniment for afternoon tea at the Ritz, but we all agree that live harp music elevated the ambiance. (Other selections included everything from “Let it Go” to Musetta’s Waltz to “Stairway to Heaven”, most of which made us smirk.) The surroundings were elegant as well, in a home-decorating-magazine-worthy, mash-of-old-and-new-materials-and-styles sort of way.
Surprisingly, the small details were not perfectly attended to: service was less prompt than at the Rotunda, one of our teas vanished in the shuffle of refills, sugar cubes were served with spoons rather than tongs (!), and the china patterns were unobjectionable but uninspiring. (Jasmine appreciated the Egyptian revival silhouettes of the pieces, but they were otherwise plain.)
The culinary highlight of the afternoon was the sandwich course. The cucumber and goat cheese round, egg salad and avocado sandwich, tomato and pea tart (with a very British base of mushy peas), and sous vide onion and green garlic were all unqualified hits. The crab on cornbread was the only miss: the sweetness of the cornbread entirely overwhelmed the crab, though its vegetarian counterpart faired well.
The sweets started out promising, too. Scones so flaky they fell apart in our hands were delicious, if logistically challenging. Unfortunately, the accompaniments — whipped rather than clotted cream and sugary rather than lemony lemon curd — disappointed. Blackberry eclairs topped with gold leaf and wonderfully tart passionfruit squares had us wishing for seconds.
Things got bleaker as we moved up the etageres to the final two layers. The chocolate-raspberry cake was merely palatable, and the orange madeleines got mixed reviews. (I found them dry, and Marissa thought their flavor was vaguely artificial.) No one fancied the matcha-white chocolate macarons, flavorless, oversized confections decorated with childish swirls of pink and yellow. Adding insult to injury, several of them were hollow, betraying a technical flaw in the meringue preparation.
We enjoyed all of our teas, though we struggled to remember which of the visually identical pots were which as we passed them around. The jasmine green tea was crisp without being overly grassy. The salted caramel oolong had great novelty value: it really did smell and taste like salted caramel. The rooibos was pleasant but too mild even after a long steeping. A standard high-quality Earl Grey and a bright and complex black-and-red blend completed our selections. Tea was served looseleaf in the pots, but we drank it quickly enough to mostly avoid over-steeping. Still, at a venue this elegant and expensive, it would have been nice to have that detail managed to perfection.
Date attended: March 3, 2018
Attendees: Hannah, Ilana, Jasmine, Marissa & Tom
Price/seat: $80
Location: 600 Stockton Street, San Francisco
Reservations: http://www.ritzcarlton.com/en/hotels/california/san-francisco/dining/afternoon-tea-in-the-lounge
