REVIEW: High Tea at Lab



The heritage Treasury Hotel.

I am back from my holiday in Thailand and ready to share with you our experience at The Lab Bar & Restaurant at the Treasury Casino. I have been to high tea before with my mother and sister and had a lovely time. The dainty sandwiches, the pretty pastries, frilly doilies - the whole experience is traditional and wonderfully feminine. So I was a little surprised, delightfully so, when the masculine and hairy Mr. Cakes expressed his desire to accompany me to high tea! He explained it, tiny sweets and scones...why wouldn't he like it?! 


Champagne and tea and everything nice!



We both got dressed up and made our way in to the city. The Lab Bar & Restaurant is situated in the Treasury Hotel, away from the main casino building itself. The history and architecture really makes the experience special, the polished timber bar that dominates the room is beautiful and really makes you want to have a drink.

 

The vintage bar...very well stocked.

The high tea is available on the weekends from 2 - 3:30pm for $45 per person.We started off with a glass of champagne Chandon NV Sparkling Brut for $12.50 then choose our tea from the La Masion Du Thé (which means the house of tea, thank you less-than-basic-French-skills) selection. The tea choice is bottomless so if you could drink $45 worth of tea, you'd certainly be getting your money's worth.


Look how handsome Mr. Cakes looks in his blue shirt. Trust me, the rest of his is very handsome too.

After we were served our tea, the tower of afternoon delicacies were presented. I really liked all the decorative charger plates and crockery. It made the setting feel particularly fancy. Traditionally, one should eat the high tea from to top plate down, starting with the scones on the top tier then savoury items then sweet pasties. On the top tier for our high tea, we had 2 scones each, one plain and one sultana scone as well as a petit quiche and frittata each.

The scones and quiches and frittatas - oh my!



The scones are now dressed up and ready for eating!

We were given individual pots of jam for the scones along with a serving cream. The scones were really nice, perhaps not as good as Mr. Cakes'...have I not told you how good Mr. Cakes' scones are? They're amazing. He must have had lessons from Margaret Fulton. The quiche and frittata were okay, they were a little underwhelming.

Nice and appropriately moist.

The next tier was the savoury level which in this case, were finger sandwiches. There were chicken salad, tomato and cheese, roast beef, egg salad and lastly salmon. They were all fresh and moreish. And they were all the right level of not-wet until Mr. Cakes dropped one in the water, which was adorable and hilarious.


The sandwich going for a swim.



The final layer was the sweets. We had opera cake, which was my favourite, glazed fruit tarts, mini lemon meringue tarts, a macaron (yes, one 'o' in macaron) each and lastly, an adorable cream puff in the shape of a swan. Unfortunately the cutest of the desserts was the least impressive. The puff wasn't very crisp so the texture was a little stale. None of the desserts blew me away, although the presentation was lovely.

The ornate swan cream puff and friends.

The high tea at Lab was nice however although I've not been to that many high teas, this ranked No. 2 in the two I have been to. It was nice though and we had a lovely time. The best thing about it though was watching Mr.Cakes try to use the dainty serving-ware. Absolutely adorable.

Food: 3/5
Service: 3.5/5
Price: 3/5
Atmosphere: 4/5