Rosewood London
Rosewood London is everything one would expect a five star hotel in London to be. The grand facade of white stone decorated in manicured conifers gives clients a wonderful first impression. The Mirror Room, where afternoon tea is served, is found through an awe-inspiring gated courtyard adorned with perfectly kept trees and shrubs.
The Mirror Room is stunning, a grand room embellished with tilted mirror ceilings, and a smoked mirrored fireplace. Traditional Chesterfield leather sofas are dotted in between dining tables to create a formal yet relaxed atmosphere. Classical music plays in the background to create the perfect ambiance.
We were greeted, seated at our table and shown the newly created Art Afternoon Tea menu. The menu looked incredible and also included a brief description of each artist that inspired the afternoon tea cakes. We opted for the Rose Champagne afternoon tea. Whilst we eagerly anticipated the delights to come, we were joined by Michael, manager at The Mirror room, a flamboyant character who clearly had a love for art, tea and Champagne!! Michael talked us through the menu, explaining in great detail about the artists and how the pastry chef had masterminded the beautiful cakes.
Michael was wonderfully enchanting, it was lovely to see someone so passionate about what they do, he made us feel very welcome and completely at ease with being in such grand surroundings. All of the staff in The Mirror Room were very friendly and happy to please, too often one can feel a little out of their depth when dining in such magnificient surroundings but this was certainly not the case in The Mirror Room and we really loved that.
Our Champagne was served first closely follwed by a brass tea stand embellished with the most beautiful cakes we think we have ever seen. You could tell immediatley that a lot of love and talent had gone into the making of this afternoon tea, it was a masterpiece in itself! How could the cakes possibly taste as good as they were to look at?
But first, the sandwiches, a simply choice of traditional smoked salmon & cream cheese, ham & wholegrain mustard, coronation chicken, advocado, tomato and basil and finally egg mayonaise. They were deliciously fresh and perfect in everyway, they didn’t need to be fancy, the cakes were the star of this show! Our scones were served warm with glorious home made tasting strawberry preserve and clotted cream. Before we indulged in our artwork, we were offered our tea. We both went for recomendations from Michael and were not disappointed, my husband loved his tea so much that he needed his teapot refilling, this has never happened before!
After spending a few more minutes admiring the cakes, we decided to try the Yayoi Kusama cake first. It really was a beauty, a perfectly glazed, yellow, passion fruit dome of white chocolate mousse decorated with perfectly formed dots on a biscuit base. The taste was incredible, an explosion of flavour and texture and thankfully tasted just as good as it looked!
Next we tried The Banksy, a chocolate cube filled with caramel and choux pastry, again there was no anticlimax, the cake was wonderful. Quite often you find that such beautiful cakes are actually very disappointing to eat, it seems that every effort has gone into making the cake look good and the taste somewhere seems to get forgotten. Refreshingly, Rosewood London had not forgotten the importance of this, their cakes were just as good on the palate, if not better!! The pastry chef had done an amazing job.
The further three cakes were just as lovely, each one completley different in flavour and appearance. These were undoubtedly the best cakes we had ever had with Afternoon Tea, The Rosewood had managed to create a unique Afternoon tea that looked and tasted out of this world!
Our overall experience at Rosewood London was one that we won’t forget, it is everything and more you would expect from a five star afternoon tea in the capital!