Afternoon tea spots have become a popular destination as people try to cope with stressful times.
These elaborate afternoon tea services have become main attractions at more than a dozen venues in New York City and Los Angeles. At Brooklyn High Low, a restaurant with two locations near the Prospect Park area, the price for the “classic” prix fixe tea service is $48 and lasts for 75 minutes.
Alice’s Tea Cup, another tea spot in NYC with three locations across the city, serves customers with an “Alice in Wonderland” theme decorating the restaurant around them.
In California, a place called Rose Tree Cottage in Pasadena provides a tea service to customers with a man in a tuxedo serving them cucumber sandwiches and sticky toffee pudding.
Back in New York, there is even now a service called Tea Around Town that hosts afternoon tea aboard a pink and white double-decker bus for those who wish to take in the views of the city while enjoying a fresh herbal tea. The interior of the bus has soft pink banquettes in place of the seating that would be typically found on a normal greyhound bus.
This salon-on-wheels business is a newer addition to various establishments with similar services, including The Peninsula Beverly Hills, the London West Hollywood, and The Plaza Hotel, which are all fashioned with a luxuriously vintage and classical feel to them.
Bruce Richardson, the master blender at Elmwood Inn Fine Teas in Danville, Kentucky, and the co-author of “A Social History of Tea,” has been keeping track of the tea scene for nearly three decades.
Mr. Richardson has expressed a theory as to why afternoon tea is having such a resurgence, as it was originally a tradition among the high-class English that started in the 1840s. “In the tea-making ritual, we rediscover our humanity, which has become obscured amid a life that is often moving too fast and filled with too much,” he told the New York Times.
Honey Moon Udarbe, the proprietor of Brooklyn High Low, said that she used to make and have tea by herself as a mode of escape, and she went on to start doing it with her daughters and friends before opening her first salon in Prospect Heights in 2020. “I like this nostalgic moment of unplugging and sitting down and chatting with people,” she commented.
For many owners of these businesses, the objective appears to be facilitating a serene place for customers to relax and destress from life.
