The East Bay is blooming with afternoon tea services, from British tea inside a preserved Victorian home, to a modern Thai afternoon tea and Filipino kamayan style tea parties. There’s even a fully vegan tea time popup.
Afternoon tea is traditionally served with scones and clotted cream, marmalade or sweet fruit preserves, small and dainty sandwiches, all on tiered trays with a pot of tea. Tea culture transformed during globalization, and in many Asian and Southeast Asian countries — where much of the world’s tea is grown — tea is a part of social life.
At the East Bay’s newest tea spot, when you sit down, a wait staff brings a tray of more than a dozen loose leaf teas in small cans. You can open each one to smell it. The small French-Thai bites includes sweet and savory pastries: guava cream-filled mini croissants, caviar on a pastry with sturgeon floss, and deviled quail eggs inflected with sumac. Nudi Blue recently opened in April, and the food is just as delicious to look at as it is to eat. A savory course is served on a terrarium, representing the foliage of Thailand. All of the teas are sourced from Chiang Mai, from white teas to oolong and earl grey — with a few specialty ones that are hand picked in the wild, and not grown on any tea farms…