DarTealing Lounge

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Tea rooms bring out the little girl in all of us.  (FYI- there are boys here as well, but I think every boy has been forced into playing house or tea party at one time in his life.)  With our pinkies in the air, its a time where we can all dress up and sip tea and play tea party and gossip with our friends.

The tea flavors here range from the traditional Earl Grey to the intriguing coconut flavored tea. 

They even serve PB&J sandwiches with hot cocoa for the little kids.

The teasets are mismatched in a cute Mad Hatter type of way.  I had to go with a traditional Earl Grey and a funky one just for fun - Pear with Eternity tea (pear and rooibos). 

You absolutely need a tea strainer here since the leaves are quite large and annoying float out of the spout.  The Earl Grey was as an Earl Grey should be, light and earthy.  The pear tea was subtly sweet, but still refreshing.

I don't normally take sugar and milk in my tea, but at tea parties its almost a requirement with your Earl Grey.

DarTeaLing offers a couple of different options of tea service and you can add additional tea pots or extra dishes.  The Taste-Tea Service for Two ($34) comes with 8 sandwiches, scones, cookies, sausage rolls, tea loafs, and petite fours.  This tea service lets you pick two flavors of sandwiches.  I kept it traditional with chicken curry and cucumber and fresh herbs.  The tea sandwiches were properly petite, but gave you enough bites to feel satisfied.  The thinly sliced cucumber sandwich with herbs and cream were delightfully delicious.  The chicken curry sandwich had a good curry flavor.  I'm not a scone person, but the scones were fluffy and tasted good with a layer of the cream and fruit jam.  The petite fours, on the other hand, were too sweet with an overpowering almond flavor.  I regretted the one bite of cookie that I had.  Yuck.   

They had two options for biscuit spreads:  fruit jam and lemon curd.  The fruit jam by itself was just ok and worked much better alongside the cream.  The lemon curd lacked any tart flavor and was a bit too creamy.

A cousin of the English muffin, crumpets are a mainstays at proper tea parties, but this one was didn't come with our tea service and was ordered separately.  Paired with a whiskey marmalade, these biscuits have the perfect nooks and crannys for a thin layer of spread that compliments the crunchiness of the crumpet. 

The sausage biscuit was one of the few savory items on the plate.  A flaky pastry wrapped around a juicy meatball.

Address:                 DarTealing Lounge
                                470 3rd St.
                                San Francisco, CA 
 

Type:                       tea/British

Popular chomps:     egg salad w/bacon
                                 cucumber sandwich

Chomp worthy:        cucumber sandwich
                                 chicken curry sandwich   
                                  crumpets