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The Caledonian Afternoon Tea in Peacock Alley Review

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The Caledonian Afternoon Tea in Peacock Alley Review

A wise monkey once said, Expectation is the mother of all disappointment. The Peacock Alley is so nice, and the hotel itself is so nice, but as I said in my review of The Caledonian, the hotel isn’t amazing on the little things so WHYYYYYYY did I still have high expectations for the Afternoon Tea?! But, I did and I was disappointed and maybe it’s my fault because I expected something quite nice. Here’s my Caledonian Afternoon Tea in Peacock Alley review.

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Caledonian Afternoon Tea in Peacock Alley review is part of the NFL in London, Scotland, and Dublin Trip Report:


Background

We love high tea, afternoon tea, whatever kind of tea as long as there is a tower and a big deal made of it 😉 Anyways, being in the U.K. created ample opportunities to indulge. For instance, my parents did 2 teas in 5 days while in London and we ultimately did 2 teas in 4 days while in Edinburgh…ya, we kinda like them. This was by far the worst.

We found a 3rd party deal online for Tea in Peacock Alley. It was a 30% off deal and we phoned the concierge to see if the hotel would honor the deal even though it was offered from a 3rd party. The concierge confirmed with the manager of the Peacock Alley that they would honor it and secured us the last seating of the day, 5pm with 3 vegetarians preparations.

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5pm comes around

We enter the Peacock Alley to find an unattended check-in station. After a few minutes of waiting and looking around we approached the bar and asked if anyone could help us. Again, very friendly and eager to help. They sent for someone. A manager soon emerged, we notified him that we were checking in for our 5pm reservation. He had no idea. WHAT?! We made the res with the hotel concierge…

He was very apologetic and quickly whipped up some staff, but we still waited another 5 minutes. At this points we kind of knew that everyone was unprepared for us being there. To make matters worse, we were the last table so I think the kitchen had even started to close up. Clearly, there had been a break down in communication.

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The Tea

It’s not cheap and we were still clinging to hope that it would turn around.

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The first problem we incurred once tea started was the tea itself. The tea came out luke warm, improperly steeped, and the pots were filled with barely enough water to fill a cup and a half of tea. I’m not sure what was going on with that… if it was inexperienced staff, but everyone was super nice that was tending to us. The other thing that both my mom and I encountered was the tea itself…the Peacock Alley blend. It was INSANELY bitter. So much so, that we ultimately sent it back and exchanged it for a normal English Breakfast. Again…not sure if it’s just a bitter tea, or if it was improperly prepared, but it was NOT good.

The Food

When we ordered the tea, we reminded them that we had reserved vegetarian options. Clearly, since they didn’t have our reservation it wasn’t reasonable to expect that they would know we had requested veggie options. This created another problem, but ultimately what we got was pretty lackluster. The sweets were fine, but dry, and just another disappointment to add to the list.

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The rock sugar was by far the coolest partcaledonian-afternoon-tea-in-peacock-alley-8-of-15

The scones…hard as a rock and not warm. The clotted cream was delicious tho.

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Things could be worse – we made a memory and the next day we had Afternoon Tea at the Balmoral which is one of the very best High Teas ever. No Joke.

caledonian-afternoon-tea-in-peacock-alley-14-of-15 The Bill

So when we made the reservation we had asked if they would honor the 30% off and the concierge called Peacock Alley ( within the hotel, mind you) and made sure that this was ok. It was. The reservation was made. We showed up…no reservation. So we made sure again before we were seated that we indeed could have a vegetarian meal and it would be discounted to match the online offer we found. This was ok’d. Then the bill comes…full price. The waitress was very nice about it and got the manager who came over and told us that he would honor it…but we were under the impression that not once, but twice it was already sorted. Ultimately, it just wasn’t the note we wanted to end on, nor the how I would imagine the Peacock Alley wants their guests lasting memory being.

Overall:

Wouldn’t go again.

Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.

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