A country drive - 'Tea and Niceties' High Tea Review

A boring working weekend has made me reminisce about the lovely time I had last weekend at Mount Tamborine, which is in the Gold Coast Hinterlands. From where we picked up my sister's friend, it took about an hour to get up there by car. My sister had booked for high tea a few weeks in advance, as bookings are essential at Tea and Niceties, so we were going to go, despite the cool weather and the fact that I had a hacking cough. Funnily enough, I hardly coughed while I was up there - must be the good, fresh mountain air. Let me take you on a visual trip there...

Tea and Niceties High Tea Review

The place:

Tea and Niceties is one of the loveliest tearooms I've ever been to. Indeed, I think it is the only proper tearoom I've been to, since most places that offer high tea these days are cafes, bistros, or hotels. From the outside, there are no particularly attractive features that make it stand out, and it's not fully visible from the street view, so most people who visit this place hear of it by word of mouth or from online foodie recommendations. My sister heard about it from a friend; I read about it ages ago on Urban Spoon. 

I was not expecting this when I walked through the door, where we were greeted by one of the friendly staff:

I felt like I was stepping back in time, into an era where traditional tearooms were common, and ladies would don on pretty tea dresses to take afternoon tea and partake in a healthy dose (or not) of daily gossip with their lady friends. For the first time, I felt like I was underdressed for high tea. Being a vintage-style clothing lover, I usually like wearing full skirts and cardies with floral or pearly trims, but had opted for a more casual outfit that day, as I appeared seemingly overdressed for previous high tea settings. This is the place where my wardrobe would totally fit in, but alas, I missed my opportunity!

The room was literally a modestly-sized room that was decorated with small chandeliers hanging off the ceiling, and simple picture frames and decor in coordinating gold, cream and pink colour tones. The tables were covered in clean white tablecloths overlaid with white lace, with faux pink rose centrepieces, and the chairs had cushion tops and their backs were trimmed with pink sashes. The place exudes an old-fashioned charm without being gaudy and pretentious. I do note that it's non-apologetically feminine and most probably targeted towards female tastes. And yes, all the customers and staff that day were female! At this point, I should also mention that the staff were all older ladies, who were very attentive, friendly, and helpful with the tea list - which we will get to. 

Finally a place with tables that are actually big enough to comfortably accommodate for more than 2 lots of cake tiers and all the tea things! 

At the back of the room, they have a bench selling random knick-knacks like old sugar spoons and glasses. The double door at the side leads into the kitchen.

The food:

Even the glasses of water, which were placed there in anticipation of our arrival, seemed that little bit more special with the slice of lemon and sprig of mint in them. 

One could choose to have the 'Traditional Tea' menu ($40pp) or the 'Elegant Tea' ($45pp). We chose the latter, which includes 2 pots of tea and a larger assortment of food. The tea list was quite long and had classic as well as more contemporary options, like the flower and fruit-infused teas. One of the staff suggested we choose 2 pots of tea at a time, so that we could try 4 different teas, as opposed to just getting one type each, which would probably get cold half way through our sitting. We ended up choosing the Stockholm (which ended up to be my favourite), the Japanese Lime (one whiff of it made me decide against even tasting it), Sydney Special (I don't remember this one.. I think it was okay), and Morning Flower (which I didn't like). Yep, I'm definitely a classic tea person. I know I should probably just choose English or Irish Breakfast at the out start, but there's a part of me that urges me to try to be more adventurous.

My Stockholm tea

And tell me these are not the prettiest sugar cubes you've ever seen! I really wanted to try using one of these to see if the icing flower would float or dissolve, but I've slowly become accustomed to taking my tea unsweetened and without milk. My sister did use one, but just pulled the icing flower off to eat!

Besides pretty sugar cubes, we also had the option of loose granulated pink sugar. How very pretty just to have it on the table to look at!

Now we get to the most important part - the food! This is what was presented to us soon after receiving our first pots of tea:

And here's a closer look at the delicacies on each tier:

Bottom tier: Cookie-cutter shaped mini sandwiches with different fillings, e.g. egg; salmon, dill and mayo; cucumber; ham; etc; savoury mini muffins, and little savoury puff pastry squares.

Middle tier: Tiny plain and fruit scones dusted with icing sugar, served with jam and cream; and a little dish of pannacotta topped with slices of fruit and chocolate shapes. 

Top tier: Sweet puff pastry filled with chocolate and cream; chocolate caramel slice; chocolate mousse in a chocolate cup filled with a layer of smooth, runny caramel; a sandwich biscuit with coffee-flavoured buttercream; 2 mini layered sponge cakes - one with jam and the other with lemon curd - frosted with cream and covered in desiccated coconut.

There were tiny clawed tongs included to serve yourself, which were good for the small things like sandwiches, but were too narrow for the bigger items, which we had to either manually stretch the legs of the tongs out for or just use the tongs to push the food directly onto our plates. In the middle tier, they included tiny little spoons to use with the pannacotta, and at each place setting was included the tiniest and cutest knife I've ever seen for cutting the little scones and spreading the cream and jam with.

And, if the photos aren't enough to do the food justice, yes, I can tell you now that the food was scrumptious! I'll admit that I probably ate more here than at any other high teas because of the delightfully dainty bite sizes of each item on offer. I often get put off by large rectangles of sandwiches and huge scones, one look of which is almost enough to make you feel full. Because the high tea menus often comprise of 3 tiers of food, you would think the idea is to allow people to sample everything from each tier. So I was very glad to see that Tea and Niceties made the effort to make all the portions petite, without compromising on the selection and amount of food presented. The scones were needless to say quite yummy, and the pannacotta was the nicest tasting one I've tasted so far.

I ate my share of the everything on the middle and bottom tiers, except for one of the muffins, and I was the only person in our group of four to be able to eat any of the desserts on the top tier! The staff provided everyone with cardboard take-away boxes to take away the left-overs (I suppose most people can't finish their food then), so I will still be able to give you a review of these goodies. My favourite of the desserts would be the little cakes, which were nice and light, but flavoursome and moist. My second favourite would be the mousse. This little thing looks like it would be overly chocolatey and cloyingly sweet, but the mousse is actually quite light and I was delighted by the hidden layer of delicious flowing caramel in the crisp chocolate cup. I'm not a fan of the cookie or the caramel slice, nor did I really enjoy the puff pastry either, but I think in the scheme of things, the menu worked out to be pretty good. Oh, and we were given a chocolate dinner mint afterwards as well, along with a bookmark and a leaflet to remind us of our experience (and to come back obviously!). Just in case you are interested, I asked the lady if the menu changes, and she said that they change it whenever they get bored of making the same things, but even then, usually it is only the fillings that get altered.

I rate Tea and Niceties an 8/10. It lost points because they don't have an adjoined bathroom, so every time someone had to use the bathroom, they had to borrow the key to the public toilet, shared with other shops in the complex, AND walk all the way through the car park and around to the back of the complex, where they had to wait for their turn outside the restroom, because there's only one (unisex) toilet available. The toilet was clean and decorated (with florals! Must be used mainly by customers of the tearoom), but when you're busting to go to the toilet after drinking a lot of tea and lemon water, and there is someone taking their time inside the only toilet, it's hardly a saving grace. On top of that, keep in mind that on the day I went, the weather was wet and unforgivingly cold. Despite this, I will probably visit this tea room again in the future, when I have the time and inclination to go for a long drive. I do highly recommend this place for the service, the atmosphere and the delicious food. It is definitely the most authentic tea room experience I've had thus far.

After our afternoon tea (which was really our lunch), which lasted for about 2 hours, we spent the rest of the afternoon exploring some of the unique little shops in the area. Mount Tamborine - in it's location in the coast hinterlands and the look and style of the shops - reminds me a lot of Montville/Maleny, which are located in the Sunshine Coast hinterlands. In fact, they have a German Cuckoo Clock shop too - maybe it's a branch of the same shop? Here, I bought two manual music boxes that play pretty German melodies.

I really wanted to go check out the fairy shop (shown in the picture immediately below) but we had to hurry home and didn't get a chance to. Oh well, next time! If there is a next time, I'd also like to go on a tour through the winery/vineyard that's in the area too. I've included some random snaps of some of the shops below:

I was excited by "Devonshire Teas" on this signpost! Another thing to put on my 'to do/eat' list!

The hand-made glass pendants actually looked pretty cool, especially how the coloured glass seems to reflect the colour of your shirt, making each piece unique. Still, it is just glass, and I don't really want to pay money to wear a piece of glass around my neck. 

Mount Tamborine is quite a pretty place, which is why a lot of people choose to hold their wedding ceremonies here. If you do decide to go for a country drive here though, I would start the day off early, to ensure you have sufficient time to do everything that you want to do before it gets dark (same for Montville and Maleny). Do let me know about your experiences!

Home time: The winding road down the mountains