Just shoot me.

DanielS · July 5, 2006

I'm finally over the hill because I quite fancy the afternoon tea described in the Guardian article. Its probably the raisin scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam that are the attraction more than anything else though...

Everything stops for tea

All Simon Mills wanted was afternoon tea somewhere nice. But could he get a table? Not a chance - every cucumber sandwich was booked up weeks ahead. It turns out that teatime is booming. And it's no wonder, he says: in a world of fast frothy lattes to go, there's something deliciously languid and non-careerist about its elaborate rituals and treats

To the Ritz, Piccadilly, London, to meet the comedian Joan Rivers. As Joanie is an enthusiastic and committed Anglophile (and not particularly big on gut-busting lunches) we have decided to take a light, but improving, afternoon tea in the Ritz's famous Palm Court. There is only one problem - it is fully booked. Even for a showbiz legend? Very sorry, says the hotel, but they just can't fit us in. They are absolutely chocker for weeks and weeks ahead.

As a seasoned Londoner I find this hard to believe. Booked for weeks? For afternoon tea? Oh, come on. You see, I've never bought in to all that guff - self-serving, image-building flannel most of it - about having to make reservations light years in advance. Show up on spec to, say, the infamously impenetrable receptions of Nobu or the Ivy, be polite, charming and patient with the front-of-house staff, and you will be unlucky to be turned away without a table most nights. But afternoon tea, it seems, is different.

The Ritz does, get this, four daily sittings of tea: 11.30am, 1.30pm, 3.30pm, 5.30pm, followed by a champagne tea served at 7.30pm. This time of year is the busiest, I am told, and it is booked solid for every single sitting. For more than a month. That is an awful lot of tea and an awful lot of dainty little sandwiches. You could probably feed the bird population of the Falklands with all the discarded crusts.

"All the way through high season - May, June, July - we have a six- to eight-week waiting list," explains Gerrie Pitt, the Ritz's director of press. "It's the same story over Christmas when we are just as busy." Indeed, such is the demand for tea and its associated gentrified rituals, that the Ritz is considering bringing back afternoon tea dances, a concept considered redundant since Noël Coward's day.

Is a six-week wait worth it? For £35 a head you get the kind of treat that "Afternoon Tea at the Ritz" habitués such as King Edward VII, Charlie Chaplin, Sir Winston Churchill, General De Gaulle, Judy Garland and Evelyn Waugh all enjoyed during the past 100 years. You will eat off and drink from fine bone china, and take tea from silver pots, milk jugs and strainers. And while you admire the oval oeil-de-boeuf windows, the deeply coved cornice and the gilded trelliswork you can choose from a selection of ham, smoked salmon, egg mayonnaise and mustard, cress, cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches, raisin and apple scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream, afternoon pastries and fresh cream cakes served on a tiered cakestand and wash them down with lapsang souchong, ceylon orange pekoe, earl grey or darjeeling.

If you can get in, that is. Dear old Joanie and I had to take tea up in her room but after our appointment, somewhat intrigued by our well-mannered rebuff, I ring round and try to make an afternoon reservation elsewhere.

The Dorchester is fully booked for ages, while a heavy breather at the St James's Tea Room at Fortnum & Mason tells me he has nothing "for at least two weeks". When I ring Claridge's I am put through to a machine that tells me I will have to book at least eight weeks in advance for afternoon tea at weekends. What does a man have to do to get a cup of tea around here? Bettys in the spa town of Harrogate (there are also branches in York, Ilkley and Northallerton) tells me I was probably looking at a 45 minutes-to-one-hour back-log for a table on Saturday (but kindly offered me a chair to sit on as I waited). And at the Hazelmere Cafe and Bakery in Grange-over-Sands in Cumbria, crowned the Tea Guild's Top Tea Place 2006 in April, owners Dorothy and Ian Stubley are reporting very brisk trade, with queues at weekends. A sweet but dinky place with no more than 50 covers, the Hazelmere can easily do 200-300 afternoon teas a day during the summer.The Tea Council described the cuppa they were served as "out of this world".

So who is pre-booking all these tea tables? Coachloads of gee-whizzing American tourists and battalions of little finger-raising Hyacinth Buckets from the home counties? Rather thrillingly, not. There is actually something distinctly zeitgeisty, hip, even subversive about afternoon tea at the moment.

When Henry Porter wrote in Vanity Fair recently about the government's "nine-year assault on civil liberties", he set the scene for his diatribe by describing a group of creative young activists who sit on the grass in Parliament Square every weekend like characters from Antonioni's film Blow-Up and hold a tea party as a silly but thoroughly legal protest against Tony Blair.

In May, when the Metropolitan Museum in New York staged a photo call for its AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion exhibition, the designers Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano et al posed obediently in Tea and Sympathy, the British-themed Manhattan caff where the likes of Rupert Everett, Michael Gambon, Quentin Tarantino and Kate Moss are regular takers of afternoon tea. ("Don't tell me those supermodels can't eat - Kate always has a second helping of treacle tart and custard," says the British owner.)

Across Manhattan, on Rivington Street, the teetotal musician Moby has opened up his own teashop, Teany, where the trendies can select their favourite brew from 98 different varieties of leaf. And in Los Angeles tea aficionados Matt Damon, Renée Zellweger and Jodie Foster like to hang out at the Elixir tea bar.

Tea has become the polite antidote to decadence and debauchery. For example, Sadie Frost has given up alcohol and declared herself "tea total" in a renewed drive for sobriety. The fashion designer/Primrose Hill set doyenne hosted an afternoon tea party for a recent catwalk show and the Tea Council made a special FrostFrench (the label she runs with business partner Jemima French) blend for the event. Partygoers went home with a pair of pink and beige Aertex knickers (the material was said to resemble the weave of a tea bag) stamped with an "I love tea" logo.

More tea, fashionistas? Alexander McQueen hosted an afternoon tea party when he opened his flagship store on London's Old Bond Street and played "mother" to the actor Charlize Theron, among others, while Tamara Yeardye Mellon, CEO of the Jimmy Choo shoe empire, will host an afternoon tea party, complete with cucumber sandwiches, at her Kensington home to launch a new Vintage collection later this month.

At the Berkeley Hotel, a stroll away from Harvey Nichols and Sloane Street, fashionisation of the afternoon tea phenomenon has gone a step further with the "fourth collection" of, wait for it, Prêt a Portea - tea with cakes designed to look like Anya Hindmarch handbags. There are Bottega Veneta hot-pant rolls, Yves Saint Laurent frou-frou berry mousses and Balenciaga monochrome-striped chocolate eclairs.

Of course, this kind of dizzy confection is utterly dippy and highly inconsequential. But it is proving extremely popular. Jonathan Ross booked Prêt a Portea for his birthday and then re-booked it for his wife, Jane, ordering a bespoke cake like a pair of her "kinky" boots. Last year, the Berkeley took the Prêt a Portea concept to the Carlyse in New York. It will also be taking it to Soho House, Manhattan, for New York fashion week in the autumn. "With afternoon tea you get a safe and lovely, warm, fuzzy feeling," says Paula Fitzherbert, PR for the Berkeley. "It's the opposite of watching people saying 'f***' over and over again on Big Brother. Models like afternoon tea because it's stealth eating. It's slow and social and girly."

What about the men? I call the most red-blooded and proudly masculine man I know: chef and restaurateur Marco Pierre White. It turns out that he loves afternoon tea. "I go to Selfridge's because its Gallery restaurant [where afternoon tea is served] is classy, anonymous and understated," says White. "And because it reminds me of being a boy in Yorkshire, and of a time where all the great department stores - like Debenhams in Leeds where my dad used to take me - had somewhere proper to go for tea. Actually, you are not going to believe this, but I am actually in Selfridge's having afternoon tea right now." And White slurps his earl grey histrionically down the line by way of proof.

How did all this happen? The reality is that we are living in a highly caffeinated hegemony. With a branch of Starbucks (and its myriad imitators) on every corner of every high street in the UK, the Americans have successfully McDonald-ised and infantilised coffee. It is not really coffee any more. It is globally franchised cod-bohemianism in the form of hot, coffee-flavoured milkshake, fed to us in obscene measures in cartons meant for fizzy drinks.

Once the choice of Soho's mods and beatniks and Montmartre's free-thinkers, coffee, or more specifically "to-go" coffee, is now brandished like a badge of urgent business. With an oversized, waxed paper cup in your hand you are telling the world that you have a full, important and busy agenda, a day that needs a little caffeine jump-start. Jeez, you haven't even got time to sit down to drink the thing. You are going to have to imbibe it, probably as you drive to a meeting, through these holes in the wholly undignified sippy-cup lid thing they gave you at the mall.

With the afternoon tea ritual, things are different. Tea is grown up. It is slow and non-careerist and English. It is Alan Bennett and Morrissey to coffee's Jessica Simpson. "Coffee doesn't have a ritual attached to it, it doesn't have any of the lovely, 'Shall I be mother?' stuff associated with it," says style-watcher Peter York, who is partial to extended tea and millefueille afternoon teas at the Wolseley restaurant, along from the Ritz in Piccadilly. "With coffee you want to rush it. With tea you want to sit, you want the accompaniments, you want to enjoy the long-drawn-outness, the community, the sharing out of a pot, the rather childish, 'I'll halve my cake, if you halve yours'."

Afternoon tea is warmly eccentric, too. "By very publicly hosting a tea party," theorises York, "Sadie Frost is showing off a whimsical, a contrapuntal side to her character. She is saying: 'I am an interesting and unpredictable woman.' Of course, it helps a lot if your day-to-day timetable works on the principal that you actually don't get up until around tea time."

Exhausted by all this, I eventually get my own afternoon tea (sans Joanie, unfortunately) at the National Dining Rooms at the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. It is run by the restaurateur Oliver Peyton of the (now closed) Atlantic Bar and Grill macro-diner, Inn the Park and the Mash microbrewery. It is lovely: smoked salmon and creamy haddock sandwich fingers, bakewell tart and two pots of darjeeling. Peyton, it turns out, spotted the afternoon tea renaissance months ago and is poised to open a new tea caff, Peyton and Byrne, on Tottenham Court Road in London. Inspired by the old Lyons Corner House tea rooms and Bettys, it will be serving myriad teas, including his own special blend, while an English bakery will offer bakewell tarts, victoria sponges, swiss rolls, eccles cakes, eclairs, treacle tarts and dundee cake. "Coffee is fast and speedy, tea is languid," says Peyton. "Starbucks has messed about with coffee but I want to pare things down with tea. Even though tea is the most normal thing in the world for British people, taking a long afternoon tea feels unconventional and quirky somehow."

Earlier this year, I discussed this concept with Dita Von Teese, the burlesque dancer, who is fascinated by all things olde world and English. I told her about Anna, the Duchess of Bedford, who, adopting the idea from the European tea service format, is widely credited with inventing the Great British Afternoon Tea tradition. Von Teese explained that when quietly ensconced in her Gothic Hammer horror LA home, she liked to pass the afternoon taking tea with her husband, Goth singer Marilyn Manson, enjoying "old-fashioned, homely things ... cookies and cake and pretty desserts. Everybody likes pretty desserts, don't they?" she said.

Marvellous, isn't it, to think of Manson complete with full Nosferatu make-up, voice hoarse from all that malevolent, shouty scream-singing, a hot pot of darjeeling brewing benignly in his pale white hand, leaning over to his beloved and asking, gently, "Shall I be mother?"

July 6, 2006

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