A friend of mine once quoted afternoon tea as being “one of the UK’s best inventions”. She’s right, of course. There’s something extremely English (or British, maybe) about sitting down for a few hours in an afternoon to daintily munch your way into a sugary, buttery haze.
Brumus is part of the Haymarket Hotel, bang in the middle of the tourist hustle and bustle of Piccadilly, which makes it immediately soulless – not expensive enough to be classy, not downbeat enough to be fun – but within its lifeless exterior, something a little more enterprising lurks.
The tea menu there is just about standard: scones, cakes, sandwiches and a pot of char. I asked for some orange juice instead of tea, which was met with the usual hotel restaurant palaver of “well I’ll see what I can do but people always have tea with afternoon tea you difficult so-and-so”. (I got my orange juice eventually, so well done to our waiter for breaking protocol.)
There wasn’t much to complain about from this outing: it was easily done afternoon tea in a fairly standard restaurant. That said, it’s easy to ruin things as easy as sandwiches and scones, so full marks to Brumus for not doing so. Well, not full marks – the scones were a bit small, and a few of the cakes were on the sickly sweet side.
If you’re in the West End and you fancy a spot of afternoon tea that isn’t served off paper plates from a St James Park café, check it out (left). At £18 per head for a fair whack of afternoon tea (and whack we did – a thoroughly unnecessary second helping of cakes plonked on at the end) is not a bad shout. And watching droves of tourists traipsing past whilst you feel snooty as anything? You can’t complain about that.
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