Chocolate High Tea, Sir Stamford, Macquarie St, Sydney

Chocolate High Tea, Sir Stamford, Macquarie St, Sydney
Sunday 16 July, 2006

I love a good afternoon tea and the Sir Stamford's - The Bar offers a variety of options - Devonshire Tea ($16 pp), Queen's Tea ($24 pp), High Tea ($31 pp) and Chocolate High Tea ($31 pp). This afternoon my chocolate buddy and I were tempted to indulge and after a self imposed chocolate ban for 2 weeks I was ready to overdose.

The Bar is your typical old English setting, large gold framed oil paintings dominate the walls and the furniture is stately set on beautiful old oriental rugs. We arrived at 3pm and were informed they didn't have any record of our booking. The staff member (who was in training) excused herself to find her Supervisor. He was happy to oblige us and invited us to take a seat at the bar while he prepared a table for us. Within minutes we had our table.

We asked for the chocolate high tea and were poured a glass of bubbly almost immediately. Cheers! Whilst we relaxed in the surroundings we wondered what the chocolate afternoon involved - it would have been nice to have a menu presented to us so that we could savour what was to come.

After about 10 minutes a tiered silver tray was presented to the table. Our waiter merely dropped it off and disappeared. Again, it would have been nice for him to explain the contents of the tray. It was a little smaller than we imagined and comprised:

- a selection of open sandwiches - 1 cucumber each, 1 egg each and 1 smoked salmon each (the cucumber and egg were fresh and presented on white bread but the salmon had obviously been in the fridge overnight as the bread was tough and it was cold)
- Chocolate chip mini scones (1 each) - these were lovely however we had massive dishes of cream and strawberry jam so we could of done with some more scones!
- White chocolate cheesecake (my chocolate buddy's oreo cheesecake runs rings around this)
- Chocolate dipped strawberries (1 each)
- Chocolate brownie (these were bite size and had walnuts and almond through them - yum!

As we polished this off we were asked if we cared for tea/ coffee - yes please. We watched as the chocolate trays were delivered to the tables around us and came to the realisation that we had missed out on receiving the Valrhona Chocolate Mousse.

The surroundings were perfect for high tea - was it worth $31 pp? I think we can do better, so my chocolate buddy and I are on a mission to find out. Stay tuned....

Chocolate High Tea, Sir Stamford - 93 Macquarie St, Sydney - (02) 9252 4600

http://www.stamford.com.au/sscq/