The beginning of our tea was not promising. We got shuffled around a vague queue until a friendly waitress showed us to our table. I'll take this opportunity to remark on the setting and the clientelle. The restaurant is very busy with people using it as an entrance to Harrods. The atmosphere is a bit hurried for my taste, more like a café than a tearoom but it fits well with the maison's Parisian provenance. The patrons seemed to consist chiefly of groups of bored rich macho males – who didn't converse but vacantly stared and used grunts to communicate their orders to the staff – peppered with appropriate female counterparts and the occasional tourist. Expensive but vulgar clothing dominates. If you want to blend in wear an expensive factory-tattered t-shirt and sunglasses with a large Chanel or Dior logo. If clothing expresses one's beliefs the patrons at Ladurée worship wealth way ahead of aesthetics.
Now to the tea. With the exception of substituting croissants and other "viennoiserie" for our traditional scones the tea menu looked unremarkable albeit promising. The menu offers a choice of two each from four sandwiches, four aforementioned pastries and four cakes. Anabelle and I like to sample so we exhausted the choices of the menu with our order. While Anabelle trekked to the toilet a pleasant waiter chap asked me to accompany him to the cake counter to select our cakes. The pastries and cakes at Ladurée looked truly splendid. I picked a praline mille-feuille, raspberry tart, rosewater cupcake and a creation they call Isphahan, which is an oversized macaron filled with berries flavoured with rosewater. Pleased with my selection I returned to the table to find Anabelle just arriving back from the toilet. Wanting to refresh myself I set out on the journey through the basement wine shop to the toilet. When I got back Anabelle told me that the pleasant chap was new and he didn't know what he was doing and that we wouldn't get the magnificent cakes I selected and we had to select cakes from the menu. This was not a disaster as the only cake we had to substitute was the rosewater cupcake. We opted for the last remaining choice on the menu: carre de chocolat.
The tea arrived shortly and the food soon followed. I ordered Ceylon tea and Anabelle ordered Darjeeling. Or the other way around but it doesn't matter as we always share everything anyway. Both teas were pleasant, although not of exceptional provenance or estate. I must point out that both Anabelle and I enjoy a spot of milk in our tea and you will seldom find us drinking Oolong or Green tea in our reviews, let alone novelties like Yerba Mate or Roiboos. All these are good but we find that black tea with milk is best calibrated to accompany the traditional afternoon tea menu.
In my view the tea at Ladurée progressed from the worst to the best. The sandwiches came wrapped in wax paper sealed with a little utilitarian sticker. I would call them uninventive at best. They would feature much better on an EasyJet flight but they didn't belong to a serious tearoom. The croissant, almond croissant and brioche that followed were a step up. Anabelle though these miniature versions of traditional French pastries were excellent but I would be more cautious and call them good. The real treat were the cakes. The Isphahan deserves a special mention, topped with a rose petal the it was a creation any Parisian patisserie could be proud of. Instead of a decent quantity of sandwiches on the bottom largest plate the sandwiches were on the tiny top plate with the bottom plate full of the large cakes. The menu was, as it often is the case with afternoon tea, a bit heavy on the sweets and we had to ask our waiter to wrap the carre de chocolate for us to go. The poor chap forgot and we had to ask one of the more competent waiters to do it for us long after we paid. Alas, we enjoyed the carre de chocolat with a pot of Nilgiri Assam the next morning in bed and it was scrumptious.
The afternoon tea at Ladurée, while far from the worst, was about as far from the best. I'm afraid we cannot give our A&A endorsement to an afternoon tea with pitiful sandwiches and the atmosphere of a railway station cafeteria. Do come for the macaron though, they are exceptional.
- Ladurée at Harrods
87/135 Brompton Road
London SW1X 7XL
http://www.laduree.fr/en/maisons/monde-details#112 - Afternoon tea £21 per person (service not included)
- Our rating: 2 out of 5
Oh boy! I visted Laduree in NYC and really want to go to one in London. I immediately thought og Harrods as it's the biggest but after your review of the train station ambienve maybe it's best to try Covent Garden? :/ x
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