My best friend and I LOVE going to high teas at different tea rooms around the area where we live. We are pretty fortunate that there are a lot of different tea rooms to choose from and quite a few of them are ranked very high on the Teamap website. One of our favorites is ranked #1 on Teamap and the other ranked #3 we like going at least once a month and make every outing a chance to try a new one close by. We decided to try out one that is ranked fairly low on the Teamap website but we assumed it might just be because not a lot of people had been there or left reviews. I am not going to mention the name of the tea room because the ladies who ran it were incredibly sweet and nice but our main course meal was not pleasant and I hate to talk bad about a business but the story is just too funny not to share! The initial arrival was fantastic, we were greeted by a dog outside on the way in (I am a HUGE animal lover) so I was already smiling about that. The tea room itself was at a great location, very easy to find on a busy stretch of road. Inside was decorated very nicely, beautiful place settings and lots of neat and interesting things to look at while sitting there. We had just had a blizzard so the place was empty aside from myself and two of my friends. The women who ran the tea room were a mother/daughter and as I said they were as sweet as pie, very friendly and chatty. The neat thing about this tea room was that you could be served an actual meal not just the traditional scone/soup/finger sandwich combo that most tea rooms provide. Myself and both of my friends all chose the crab cake meal. Also, unlike some other tea rooms I have been at, this one provided not only two types of tea at once but also a glass of water and a goblet (yes a goblet, they were so neat!) of what I can only describe as some sort of fruit juice. Our first course was a fruit salad that consisted of pineapple,banana,orange,shredded coconut and I'm sure a few other fruits which was yummy.
Our second course was the salad with the house dressing which was fantastic, the dressing was extremely good and I was thinking how great this tea room was and how I didn't understand why it would be ranked low.
Our next course was our scone and bread plate, I cannot remember each flavor but some were better than others, again still very pleased with everything though I wish the plate had come with a larger helping of the clotted cream as I really had to section out how much of each piece of scone got some cream.
Next was a choice of soup and we all chose the clam chowder. My favorite thing about going to teas is that I get to try new foods that I've never had before and this was one of them. I until that point had never had clam chowder. The broth was great, but I wasn't a fan of the clams. I don't think it had anything to do with the tea room I just found out that I am not a big fan of clam chowder.
Around this time of drinking so much tea I felt the need to use the restroom. I got up to go and had to walk down a hallway near the kitchen area and as I was walking back to the bathroom I was hit hard by what I can only describe as a foul stench of oceanic rot. I kind of figured okay, maybe something had gone bad since I was nearer to the kitchen and I just got a whiff of it. So I walk back out to the main dining area but the smell is still kind of hanging in the air now, I go to sit back down and I can't help but to tell my friends how horrible something smells back there. One friend gets up to use the restroom next and by this time the stench had definitely reached the dining room area and we are all wondering what in the actual hell kind of rot stench are we smelling? Shortly after, here come our plates of crab cakes.
Oh god, our plates of crab cakes. Our crab cakes REEK of this exact rotten dead sea smell. I was holding in my need to vomit so hard. Every breath I took through my nose I was that much closer to spewing my fruit/tea/salad/scone/clam chowder mixture onto this plate of reeky crab cakes. I could not even bear to bring the fork up to my mouth to even taste one. My one friend somehow (I don't know how Jess!) she mustered it down, but my other friend was in the same boat as me. There were also steamed broccoli and mashed cauliflowers on the plate and I tried to get down some bites of broccoli (the pieces not touching crab cake that is) but I just couldn't. We resorted to breaking up the crab cakes (oh my god horrible idea, the instant my fork cut through it was another assault on my nostrils) We tried to push the food around and make it look like we ate some (yes, the tactics you used in elementary school to make it look like you ate enough food to be allowed to go out to the playground! unfortunately we had no milk cartons to shovel evidence in) At this point I'm frantically looking around the room for a place I can secretly discard my food. I know it all sounds crazy but it's not polite to not finish your food and we don't have the heart to say when something is not good but seafood should never ever ever smell like these crab cakes did. The older lady comes out and asks how we are doing and notices that my friend and I still have very full plates so being as kind as she was she told us she'd give us more time to finish. The inward groaning of nooooo! this can't be happening was playing over in my mind. My only wish at that point was to breathe fresh air. I began searching through my pockets for tissue or something to conceal some of this rotten crab cake and found a doggy waste bag from that morning's walk with my dog who never went #2 I debated long and hard about scooping it all up and putting it in there but then what? what do I do after I have a dog poop bag full of rotten crab cake? there was no trash can, I couldn't carry it back to the bathroom and flush it and if I could get it back there what if I clogged the toilet? I couldn't bear to shove it in my purse and have to continue smelling it the whole way home. Eventually the lady came back out, seen our food still wasn't eaten and we lied to her face saying we were just full from everything else and we were having a hard time finishing. She asks if we'd like a doggie bag to take home and I'm sitting there all wide eyed like 'how did she know' omg no we cannot take this home 'no thank you!' was all we could muster. Our last course was dessert and I chose the cherry pie and quite frankly it was pretty good so at least it all ended on a good note.
We were not charged full price for our meals so either because we didn't eat them or maybe she even realized how bad they smelled and could have quite possibly served us rotten crabs I don't know. Aside from the crab cake fiasco overall it wasn't so bad but it was no where even close to some of the other tea rooms I've been to so I will keep going back to the ones I know and love and wish the best for this mother/daughter and their tea room.
