Secret Garden Tea Company- Lovely Scones and Sandwiches, Not So Great Desserts

Secret Garden Tea Company is located in Kerrisdale and is probably one of the most popular high tea places in Vancouver. People always look at me weird when I say I have never been here, so on one particular occasion, I came here with a bunch of foodie friends for some high tea.

The atmosphere is very quaint and country like. It feels quite cozy, but at the same time, the wooden chairs weren’t the most comfortable to sit on. I suggest thicker cushions, haha, but now I’m just being picky. :P

Most of us chose the Demi High Tea ($12.95) because we all had lunch and were not very hungry. The Demi High Tea comes with two miniature sweets, two miniature sandwiches, a miniature scone, raspberry jam, Devon cream, and one of their Secret Garden Teas. Rae and I both ordered the Creamy Earl Grey so we were given a bigger pot of tea in a cute teapot cozy.

The Creamy Earl Grey is Secret Garden’s best seller and has accents of Bergamot & Vanilla. I thought it was quite good, but it didn't taste very special to me. But given that I'm no expert on tea, don't take my word for it.

I like the Creamy Earl Grey tea better with cream and sugar. :D

My friend was hungry so he ordered the Daily Special Panini and it came with a garden salad. The Panini had bacon, turkey, Brie, avocado, and a few other ingredients I can’t quite remember. He liked it a lot and I believe he was satisfied with the meal.

This is the Home-Style Mac’N Cheese ($11.95) and it consists of “pasta shells in a creamy béchamel sauce, with onion, aged cheedar and parmesan cheese”. This also comes with a side salad (and a cute flower decoration!). I didn’t try any of this and he didn’t have anything else to say but “it’s good” so I won’t comment on this dish.

We were given an apricot scone and two miniature sandwiches.

This had Dijon mustard and black forest ham inside. The bread was a bit dense for me but the flavours worked really well together.

I really liked this miniature croissant stuffed with turkey, greens, and cranberry sauce. The exterior was perfectly crispy and flaky (as you can see in the photograph), and it wasn’t oily to the touch.

The sugar crusted apricot scones were very delicious. I have had better scones elsewhere but this comes pretty close. The sugar on top did not cause the scone to be too sweet which was a nice surprise!

I didn’t try any of the raspberry jam because I was absolutely in love with the Devon cream. I tried to put as much Devon cream as I could onto each bite of scone because it was that delicious! So fresh, so light, so creamy... can’t get any better than that.

On to the sweet desserts! The lemon tart was alright and not very interesting. The crust was too thick and hard in my opinion as it caused me to break the whole tart into pieces when trying to fork a bite.

The Raspberry bar was too sweet and it didn’t taste very fresh to me. It would have been nice to also get some fresh chunks of raspberry inside the bar instead of on top as a garnish.

Just by looking at the Coconut Dream Bar (right) I knew it would be very sweet. I just wasn’t expecting a mouth full of sugar when I bit into it though. It was so intensely sweet that I had to almost spit it out. I didn’t try the Pecan tart. :(

On the left is a chocolate soft cookie with chocolate cream on top. I forgot the exact name of this dessert but it was good. Very rich and chocolately indeed. I actually don’t even recall trying the dessert on the right because it didn’t look very appealing to me.

I also did not try the cream puff but I think everyone else who had a bit thought it was alright.

The chocolate brownie was also very rich and dense, much like the chocolate cookie.

Overall, the savoury sandwiches were pretty good, but the miniature desserts fell short. Some of the desserts were way too sweet, and some were a little boring (sorry!). In the future, I will probably still choose Meloty (post here) in Richmond or Fairmont Vancouver over Secret Garden for high tea.

Based on these reasons:

• prices are not cheap (regular high tea is about $26)
• the sweet desserts were average at most
• with the abundance of high tea places in the Lower Mainland, this does not top my list

Service Rating: 4.5/5

Food Rating: 2.5/5

Price: $$-$$$ ($10-$30)

Overall Rating: 3/5

Happy Eating!

courtesy of http://caffeinatedglobe.blogspot.com/2011/02/afternoon-tea-at-intercontinental-hong.html