Anabelle and I may have just found the best afternoon tea in London. I know this is a bold statement but our Tete-a-Tea experience was not much short of flawless. Hosted by Sharon Jakobowitz in the former Dalston Boys Club off Kingsland Road this pop-up tea event is much more glamorous than the vicinity may suggest.We entered the building through a beaten up old door unlocked by a buzzer – an experience perhaps more familiar to gallery goers and pop-up event enthusiasts rather than we tea marms. We peeked into the ground floor music hall whose air of last night's merry-making permeated into the stairwell. Up a couple of flights of stairs we were welcomed to a parlour that blended the atmosphere of a domestic homage to Dracula's lair with that of a Mayfair mansion set to hold a secret society meeting.
I didn't realize how intimate the event was going to be. If you're seeking to submerge into the soothing anonymity large cities offer to their dwellers don't go to Tete-a-Tea. The event takes the entire afternoon and you'll be seated at a country house-style communal table with 9 other punters. Do not expect a chatty bed-and-breakfast overbearing host and geriatric patrons though. Anabelle and I were the only white-haired ladies among the guests who hailed from Germany, Denmark, Canada, Australia, Italy and, yes, London – the kind of mix so familiar to Londoners. It was remarkable how unconstrained it felt to sit with all these strangers. We thought we'd need to drop in an Isabelle Hupért-style, irreverent, shocking remark to get the conversation going but people seemed quite comfortable with each other and there was no need to disrupt the genteel atmosphere.