Afternoon tea need not be an upturned-pinkies-and-starched-napkins affair, as evidenced by these spots, each with a riff on the midday ritual.
PODUNK
231 East Fifth Street (Second Avenue)
(212) 677-7722
The ineffably charming Podunk, in the East Village, is a self-styled “American tearoom”—the “American” being an important designation for the proprietor, Elspeth Treadwell. Her take on afternoon tea is distinctly more relaxed than is its studied British cousin. (This is the version replicated around town at fine hotels, typically with a harp strumming in the background and with a price beyond the purview of this column.)
For starters, there’s no table service: orders are placed, and picked up, at the counter, under a sign that says “No Sniveling.” Eighteen varieties of tea meals are listed on the menu, and Ms. Treadwell, hands often tucked into apron pockets, will pause from her baking to dispense advice on tea pairings or to concoct a custom blend.
Trays laden with teapots, no two alike, must be navigated through the tight room’s odds-and-ends country décor: garden chairs, a wooden sled and ice skates, bookshelves crowded with Oz books. The very air smells buttered.
The food delivers on that Proustian promise, comforting and nostalgic, with a few subtle surprises. The cucumber sandwiches in the Old Friends’ Tea ($25) are prettily composed of white bread on one side and brown on the other; the strawberry jam is laced with cayenne.
The Blunt & Savory ($25)—intended to “blunt” the appetites of “husbands and boyfriends who complained about eating only cake,” Ms. Treadwell explains—comes with mint-and-parsley-dappled scones and flaky tea pies whose contents on a given day might include mushrooms marinated in red wine; caramelized onions; and a potent mix of spinach, bacon, cranberries and feta.
Part of the fun is mixing and matching: a couple might order both the no-nonsense Shaker Tea ($12), summed up on the menu as “bread; cheese; tea,” and the Chocolate Tea ($14), which takes as its guiding principle the notion that anything—gingersnaps, poppy-seed cookies, brownies, strawberries—can be improved by being dredged in chocolate sauce and whipped cream.
CHA-AN TEAHOUSE
230 East Ninth Street (Third Avenue)
(212) 228-8030
At Cha-an, up a narrow staircase from the street, afternoon tea is less free-form and more sedate, befitting the simple wooden tables and pewlike banquettes.
The Afternoon Tea Set ($18) consists of two miniature bagels, made in house (baking lessons are offered every second Monday; the bagel is rated “intermediate difficulty”), one with smoked salmon, the other slathered with strawberry butter, and an array of doll-size treats, including a scone slightly bitter from an infusion of Earl Grey tea.
The food is Western in provenance, but Japanese in presentation—bagels come in a woven basket, sweets in a bamboo scoop—and in the restraint with sugar; here, texture (crumbliness, cakey-ness) carries the day.
TEA BOX AT TAKASHIMAYA
693 Fifth Avenue (54th Street)
(212) 350-0180
The Tea Box cafe, in the basement of the uptown emporium Takashimaya, has a Tokyo-chic setting—chocolate pillows, metallic wall coverings, tiny light bulbs wrapped in silver mesh—that’s showing its age. But its East-West Afternoon Tea ($20) is exquisite, arranged on a lacquered tray, with lollipops of rock sugar for stirring.
“Sandwiches” include a clear spring roll and finely shaved cucumber pressed into triangles of rice. Cups of spiced nuts and yam chips defy Emily Post’s precept that tea be confined to “bread and cake.” But the cookies, made by the Tokyo-based company Yoku Moku (packages of them are sold in the adjacent store) seem perfunctory.
CENDRILLON
45 Mercer Street (Broome Street)
(212) 343-9012
At Cendrillon the weekend brunch menu features three items for merienda, the Philippine afternoon tea: bibingka ($9.50), a fluffy rice-and-coconut-milk pancake with lodes of gouda and feta; suman ($7.50), deep purple rice steamed in leaves and accompanied by caramel and mango; and halo-halo ($7), a tropical sundae, with purple-yam ice cream atop a swirl of toasted rice, coconut and pineapple gel, jackfruit and adzuki beans.
The tea list is a single page, and the distracted staff may pair delicate clay cups with clunky coffee mugs. But the drowsiness that pervades the exposed-brick space is perfectly conducive to a lazy afternoon retreat. Raid the appetizers for ukoy ($8.50), airy shrimp-and-tofu fritters cut in huge triangular blocks reminiscent of Rice Krispies treats, if you need an excuse to linger.
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