Comments
High Tea - the latest craze
I just got invited to High Tea at Kirkcaldie and Stains! Turns out this is the latest craze to (re) sweep the world.
From some article in the Dom Post:
“WHILE you are thumping your keyboard and shovelling junk food from the office vending machine into your gob, in downtown Wellington people are nibbling cheesecake, discussing genteel topics such as the scent of fresh roses and taking tea.
It’s high tea, Wellington-style, with wee mince pies and fat-lipped china.
Catching up over coffee is all well and good, and a tradition which surges through the caffeinated veins of this city, but there’s a growing market for the global resurgence in high tea.”
High Tea is expensive ($20) if you think of it in terms of tea and scones (like Emma does), but as the marketing guy in charge of the high tea ‘experience says’: “It’s not just the tea or the sandwiches or the scones. It’s the whole experience.”
I trust him, he is in marketing.
And also, it reeks of classiness, or being a delicate lady who would never flick spaghetti all over her face by accident, or knock over a tea cup or feel awkward whenever she is around breakable things. Of being a socialite in the 1800’s in our mother country.
But no sticky outy pinkies when sipping the tea. Turns out that is like sooo not cool at modern day High Tea.
UPDATE: This is sophisticated us
June 17th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Kinda irrelevant but have to mention that my wife and I had dreams that we would bring this thing about tea to NZ way back in 2005. There are a bunch of excellent ways to take tea in manhattan and we got quite into the idea that when we came back it would be a good opportunity here. We used to ‘take tea’ (I love that the English language grants the practice its own special verb ;-) in lots of differnet ways around the city. Tea taking is, it seems, most often a japanese/chinese thing actually, there are some amazing ‘high tea’ places in the back of the tea shops in Chinatown where you can pay a very high price for some very fine first flush. But of course the english and (would you believe) the french also do a great high tea of their own. Our idea was that our tea would come from a fantasy alternate history where Captain Bligh (who was actually pretty cool) had stayed in Tonga and eventually joined up with the chinese to create a south pacific tea company/tea empire of our own (all in the name of english wooden paneling in a pacific style you see.. well OK maybe you don’t maybe it needs more visuals ;-).
Anyway I think that even with Kirks doing this (a good thing I guess) and with T Total opened up there is still a opportunity to open up a real, dedicated tea shop of some kind in wellington - I’m sure us wellingtonains would go for it. Nothing folks like more around here than putting a bit of ponce on (if you’ll forgive me for saying so). I guess T Total kinda took the wind out of our own personal schemes - that and having that third kid -since we were going to start with tea distribution and then move on to bigger and better things over time. (Tea buying trips on a slow boat through china were always part of the plan!) Anyway, not for us any more but I still think there is a great opportunity to do tea ‘right’ in either a traditional way (as in 1888 traditional) or in a new way not previously seen (if I was Japanese, and into the japanese culture (old or new) but also a Kiwi I think that would open up be lots of possibities I wouldn’t feel comfortable trying as an ethnically challenged whiteboy).
There are a couple places in Auckland that are doing this also, which is good, but not going ‘all out’ yet - that is if the dreaded Coffee makes an appearance then suddenly youre just a cafe. I think anywhere with chairs tables and cups will get typecast in a second. No coffee I think is a requisite rule (at least for the first hundred years or so). The other rule would be ‘no tea’ - that is if you walk into the place and ask for “a cup of tea please” you are told “sorry” we don’t have that but politely directed to the menu, eh? Also the menu should have edglets, tiger tea, and everything from twinings to thousand dollar fgtfop chinese tea.
Its going to happen here I look forward to visiting some more places and being envious of the owners in the next few years.
June 18th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Wow Miles that’s awesome!!!!
I concur, no coffee allowed. I think the idea is just cool enough and different enough to get quite the following in a place like Wellington.
I just hope they do it well at Kirks, I’m sick of going to half-hearted places…
June 19th, 2008 at 10:14 am
I visited Sri Lanka recently, and saw over 1000 different teas. Some came from a single bush, others from a particlar ‘tier’ on the plantation. All those I tried (lots) were a totally different experience to the ‘blended’ teas we get in the supermarket.
I’m all for it. Please use 7-up to make the scones, it makes them extra fluffy (as opposed to the lead weights some places give their name to)!