Happy Brew Year from Noveltea.co.uk
January 1, 2013
Spotted in a shop window in Bristol
2012 has been a busy year for Noveltea for all sorts of reasons. We visit dozens of tearooms over the course of the year and have reviewed plenty for you on our blog and website including Lahloo in Bristol, The Rose in Oxford, and Cup in Glasgow.
In 2012 Noveltea went mobile: now your nearest tearoom is in your pocket!
We’ve also been baking, of course in the THQ kitchen and look forward to sharing some of our better concoctions in the New Year as well as a special little expose we’ve been preparing about the ones which didn’t work so well. (On this note, one thread which attracted a lot of attention was The exploits and misadventures of Herman the German Friendship cake - a cautionary tale of the unexpected pitfalls which await the unwary).
Herman the German Friendship cake passes through the Noveltea kitchen on its worldwide journey.
Amongst other inervations we’ve introduced our new BlogWatch feature, which lets us bring to light other tea-related blogs like Afternoon Tea Total and Tea for You and Me. If you manage such a blog or website, or just know of one we might like then please do get in touch.
New in 2012: our BlowWatch feature focuses on the exploits of fellow tea-lovers
Noveltea was established – all those years ago – to help fellow tea lovers find great afternoon tearooms. What continues to delight and surprise us year on year, though, is the enthusiasm we get in return.Along the way, and among others, we’ve met Fanny, Sam and Jane from vintage tea party planners Nips and Crumpets, and the guys from The Attic, Bristol. This year we met TV presenter Maddie Moate, spent a week with Professor Robert Murphy in his beautiful cottage in Ireland and made contact the Chester Ladies Cycling Club and are very much looking forward to a project together in 2013.
We bump into TV presenter Maddie Moate who is happy to model our new range of headwear
Allow us to extend our warmest seasonal wishes to all the above, and of course you our loyal readership. 600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012 and in the same period we understand that this blog got about 3,500 views. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 6 years. For more nerdy statistics and figures you can view our full annual report.
It only leaves us to iterate our thanks and best wishes and we look forward to seeing you back next year.
For what is fast approaching more years than we care to remember we have been reviewing afternoon tearooms across the UK, from trains to treehouses, from Land’s End to John O’Groats, from terrifically good to just terrific. We rate all establishments using our uniquely developed ‘Noveltea Teapot Rating’ system from 1 to 5 but It was put to us recently by the good ladies of the Chester Ladies’ Cycling Club that we have never formally published the criteria upon which we base our judgements… Until now.
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Noveltea.co.uk |
Defining |
Roughly how far |
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One pot |
Dreadful. This is reserved for when somewhere is unhygienic or dangerous about the place. |
Would travel >100 miles to avoid. |
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Two pots |
A notch below the average UK tearoom. Something wrong here. |
Would to travel >50 miles to avoid. |
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Two and a half |
Your average UK tearoom, that is: squirty cream, butter and jam from small plastic containers, microwaved scones, stale or mass produced cake, cheap tea bags etc. |
If there were only two tearooms in town we’d pick the other one. |
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Three pots |
A notch above the average tearoom but again nothing too special. The majority or the places we visit seem to achieve 3 – 3.5 pots. |
If there were only two tearooms in town we’d pick this one. |
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Four pots |
Now we’re talking. A great tearoom with no signs of any of the faux pas present in their poorer 2.5 pot relatives. |
Would travel >50 |
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Five pots |
Five potters are few and far between and we reserve the honour for the very best of the best. All the above is taken as read; it must possess something genuinely unique to well and truly blow your socks off. |
Would travel >100 miles just to visit. |
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1. These ratings are subjective and depend on many factors, not least how we’re feeling at the time. We attempt to be honest and accurate above all things; some ratings are based on a single visit, however, so may be artifactually high or low. If you own a tearoom and find fault with our review then we would encourage you to get in touch with a view to us revisiting your establishment or removing it entirely and forthwith. |
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So there we have it. A list of tearooms in each category is available at our website and new ones are being added all the time. If there’s something special about your favourite tearoom, be it crisp linen napkins, fresh-from-the-oven cakes and scones, or the genuine smiles then please do get in touch.
Lahloo Bristol comes up trumps
November 2, 2012
Lahloo Pantry,
12 Kings Road,
Clifton Village,
Bristol,
BS8 4AB
0117 329 2029
As the city of Bristol boomed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, largely thanks to industrialisation and the trade people and commodities, so the doomsday-book village of Clifton swelled in size and in opulence. Today it’s home to some of the smartest shops and addresses in the city and is a likely place as any to find the finest tearooms. Of all of these, Lahloo Pantry, named after a Chinese tea clipper, is perhaps the very finest of all.
Given its unpropitious position (by the bins around the back of WH Smith) and demure frontage you could be forgiven for missing it entirely but in the year since it started trading in 2011 it has established an enviable reputation among the good folks of Bristol. Hopes raised, and bellies rumbling we were the first customers in on Saturday morning.
The décor is minimal but inviting: bare wood, warehouse lighting and casually stacked tea chests and paraphernalia, amongst which you perch on high stools. The menu is funky and economical. The service is sharp without being pushy. The anticipation is unbearable.
Many tearooms face the problem of how to enforce appropriate brewing times upon their impatient clientele. Some provide little egg timers and a strainer; others (like the Attic Tearoom) opt for ingenious mechanical gizmos which drain the liquor off the leaves at the appropriate juncture. At Lahloo they take the attitude ‘why risk it?’. After all when the tea is that damn good why not let the pros decide how and when to serve it? So tea comes served in a small cast iron pot, pre-infused and ready to roll – the coffee in rather scientific-looking conical flasks. Both were astoundingly good, in fact we’d put our necks on the line here and say possibly even The Best.
After that they could do no wrong. For Lily: delicious savoury scones with homemade chili jam. For Amos: a selection of cakes and patisseries that, days later, still send him into little reminiscent spasms of pleasure. It is very seldom we enjoy tea as much as we did in Lahloo, and unprecedented that we should order second helpings to go.
(formerly) Oxford’s best tearoom: Rosy-tinted spectacles
September 19, 2012
The Rose Tearoom,
The High,
Oxford
OX1 4AS
01865 244429
Back as Oxford undergraduates, where we met, there weren’t that many serious contenders to the title of ‘Best Tea in Town’: it was between the Grand Café, the Randolph and the Old Parsonage (whose reviews can be found elsewhere) and of the three the former was a clear winner. Then one day a new tearoom opened up on the High which threatened to change everything. The Rose was chic and classy and offered a fabulous selection of loose leaf teas and an equally impressive variety of fresh cakes, scones and savouries with which to marry them. Although we made careful notes on the back of a napkin as we always do, we were let down by our filing system (that is to say the box under the desk in the spare room) and due to this gross oversight our review was never made public… until now.
Unfortunately the delay does not seem to have been in The Rose’s favour; it has not only lost out on the glory associated with such a prestigious review but in the intervening period it appears to have fallen in out estimations. The original napkin, although somewhat grubby does clearly say 4 pots out of a possible 5 but when we visited it today, try as we may, we felt physically unable to be so generous.
Where have they misplaced that all-crucial extra pot? The tea and cake is actually just as good as we remember; there remains an exciting assortment of fine teas and the scones practically grab you by the lapels and scream ‘fresh’ in your face. In fact we’ll put our necks on the line and say judged solely on this basis it could still be the best in Oxford. But please! What happened to the service? Call us stuck-in-the-mud old fuddy-duddies but:
1) A Gallic shrug is not a serviceable answer to a question, neither is pointing mutely at the cake display;
2) If you can be lured into conversation we’d rather have it with your face than your retreating behind;
3) The bill is the bill and as such not to be presented as if it were a pair of your soiled underpants
And since you’ve gone and got us in a complainy mood we also resented having to walk through the kitchen to get to a toilet which looked like it belonged on an Indian sleeper train. It doesn’t do to dwell on negatives and we do accept – indeed hope – that this may have been an unfortunate one-off but until we know we can be treated with the civility deserving of their (really rather good) tea, our hands are tied.
Go on say it: we’re stuck-in-the-mud old fuddy-duddies.
3/5 pots
Our cup of tea… in Glasgow
September 15, 2012
Cup Tearoom
311 Byres Road
Glasgow
G12 8UQ
0141 357 2525
The stream of Lily’s eulogy was halted – but only briefly – by the tinkling of our electronic egg timer, which informed us that our Ceylon Ruhunu was good to go; if you’re in business of eulogising (or afternoon tea for that matter) you’ll find plenty to occupy you here.
‘Cup’ was a chance discovery and, like finding a twenty pound note in the pocket of a pair of trousers you haven’t worn for a while, a very welcome one indeed as we battled against the rain down in Glasgow’s “posh” West End. Once inside a ceiling-high glass frontage affords this quirky modernist tea room a light and airy demeanour, in despite of its compact size, and instantly banished our fears and demons of the wet and threatening Lothian streets. Seated efficiently yet with warmth we stared agog at the burgeoning tiered cake stands of our fellow diners, the weighty menu of teas and tisanes in front of us and the bar to our rear, constructed from an edible wall of fairy cakes.
We placed our order and waited with a strange mixture of excitement should the food live up to our seventeen storey high expectations and apprehension in case it should not. When it arrived what little professional veneer we had continued to affect was replaced by undiluted, childlike glee: each cake was a work of art, each sandwich a celebration and the scones tasted like they’d been plucked from the oven only milliseconds beforehand. Needless to say in all the excitement our eyes and the size of our tummies lost track of one another and when the euphoria subsided we ended up gazing (Amos: wistfully, Lily: tearfully) at the remnants of our repast but we needn’t have worried as doggy bags – although nothing as vulgar as a bag, of course – were on hand and we clutched them tightly under our coats on the subway journey home lest we be mugged.
Justifying 4 and a half pots was the easiest decision we’ve ever had to make; justifying why it doesn’t earn the coveted 5 pots was probably the most difficult. Certainly if there’s a better tearoom in Scotland we should like to know about it.
Cup of Brown Joy – Elemental
September 14, 2012
A week has past since the Great Herman Debacle and life is gradually returning to normal at THQ. True, the walls around the boiler may never return to their original colour and there is a faint yeasty smell in the air which has proved resistent to even the most liberal daily doses of Febreze. We have been all but living on a delicious apple and cinnamon cake which issweet and crispy on top and moist in the middle as a good cake should be. The bruise on my hip is fading and tomorrow we’ll pick up my coat, jacket and trousers from the dry cleaner – hopefully cakemix free.
Above all we got back in touch with some old friends. Rose calledfrom Canterbury to say that just when she thought her week couldn’t get any worse someone had played a horrible practical joke on her in the post. We declined to offer any further explanations but then Hannah rung from the Post Office, where she had been judiciously summonsed to explain why the morning’s mail bound for Fulham was all stuck together.
“If I hadn’t recognised your writing I would have called the police!”, she chided.
Finally, Olivia sent us this picture from Sailsbury of the package she received the following day:
If at first you don’t succeed: Herman arrives in tact (more or less)
I would hesitate to call the episode an unmitigated success. On reflection I think sending ANYTHING living in the post is probably best avoided. In this instance it seems the pressure of the gas given off by the metabolising yeast (like a frail shoot punches up through thick tarmac) was enough to cause lid and tub to part company somewhere on the tube, and then again in the local sorting office.
We have heard several mentions of Herman the German Friendship cake since then and each time we roll our eyes knowingly and swear that if anyone pulls that stunt again it’s going straight in the bin. You know, the one with the dent in it.
A strange sight would have met your eyes, were you to have entered the kitchen of Tea Head Quarters on the morning of the 10th day. I couldn’t get the stamps off the ruined envelopes, so there they sat, limp and discoloured on the draining board to dry while a bowl-full of cake mixture bubbles along contentedly from its prefered spot on the toaster.
We resent the cake again, this time using surgical tape and industrial quantities of string to stop the lids from erupting, while we completed the final stages of the recipe.
After all the excitement of the last few days it’s nice to sit down with a piece of cake and a cup of tea. The end product is delicious, even if the smell has pervaded the entire house for over a week previously.
At last! Just when we were begining to question how long we could stretch this feature out, the final day is nearly upon us. I get out the address book only to find that I don’t have anyone’s current addresses. Several texts and a ball of string later and here we go:
All wrapped up and ready to go…
I take the packages up on the train with me to London, intending to post them as soon as I can find a box. 4 hours later I’m still carrying them around like a lemon. The security guard at the Tate Modern gives me a token and a very funny look when I go to check them in. I notice a funny smell but put it down to the drains on the South Bank. We’ve still got the blasted things in the bag come the afternoon and we’re in Selfridges when I look down at my coat and notice something sticky. I go to wipe it off but it has the opposite effect. I look down at my shoes and the same sticky residue is evident there too.
Glancing behind me I see a thin trail of slime, stretching out like that of a monsterous snail. People are giving me funny looks and I realise what the smell is. All three mini-Hermans have exploded in their envelopes and are gaily leaking their contents all over the 5th floor.
The 1st attempt did not go well
We managed to talk the management into giving us one of their smart yellow bags, shortly before we are thrown out. We do try to explain that it’s cake mixture but we don’t sound convincing, even to ourselves. We return to THQ with our tails between our now rather sticky legs and rethink our options.
We repatriate the German friendship cake back into its container and prepare to resend it, this time in rather smudgy, sticky envelopes.
We are both sick of the sight and smell of the thing but since there is only a day to go we decide to stick at it. I take it down from the top of the boiler and reinstate it on the toaster in preparation for day 9.
