Confessions of a Chocoholic Afternoon Tea, Podium Restaurant LONDON HILTON ON PARK LANE

Confessions of a Chocoholic Afternoon Tea

PODIUM RESTAURANT
LONDON HILTON ON PARK LANE

22 PARK LANE, LONDON, W1K 1BE
January 2015

This was a late Christmas present for my 3 eldest nieces ( will be looking for children’s ones to take my 6 and nearly 2 year old nieces to in the next few years! ) and was a real treat to look forward to in the second week of a cold January. It was also great because I’d booked and paid for it before Christmas on Buy a Gift and had a 2 for 1 offer.

I arrived a little bit early to the Podium restaurant - the staff were so welcoming - lovely Portuguese gentleman who took my coat.  I admit to being slightly biased as met another lovely Portuguese gentleman 28 years ago when I was living and working in Portugal, he was working in a hotel, totally charmed me , made me a coffee and we’ve been married 26 years….

We had a chat about Portugal as he noticed my surname and invited me to sit at the bar or I could wait on my table. I ended up having a G & T at the bar – (good choice of gins, disappointing tonic choice) which is a mark of how comfortable I was, despite travelling extensively around the country for my work over the last few years, I never drink alone and certainly never sit in a bar by myself. But the barman, although very busy was also chatty and kept me company.

I was shown to my table (introduced to a delightful Portuguese waitress on the way) and my nieces arrived.

Immediately the afternoon tea was explained to us – about the teas, the open sandwiches and the chocolate and cakes. I think this is a really important part of the afternoon tea experience – the anticipation of what is to come! We were also given a jug of water and glasses without asking - a nice touch. 

 We were then given our choice of 5 open sandwiches- smoked salmon & horseradish, honey roast ham & Pommery mustard, prawn cocktail & baby gem lettuce, cucumber cream cheese & chives, egg & cress

One of my nieces is expecting so the lovely lady went off to ask the chef what might not be suitable and came back with suggestions, the rest of us swapped and changed and asked for 2 of this etc and she patiently wrote it all down and took our tea orders  - some really unusual choices and were told we could choose a different one next time if we wanted to.

The sandwiches were delicious – very obviously freshly prepared and made to order, each one really flavoursome. I was a only a little dubious about the egg mayonnaise one (far left) as the egg was a bit too finely chopped for my taste – almost granular rather than chunky which seemed odd texture wise.

Tea was served in white teapots with white crockery and tea strainers - I had The Hilton Royal Englishand the girls had lapsang souchon and a green tea. We all agreed the tea was perfect temperature - annoying when its just warm.

Ooh the scones … a delight – fluffy, warm, scones with a choice of chocolate chip, plain or raisin with a scrumptious praline chocolate spread and of course clotted cream and strawberry jam.

At this point was applauding my decision not to have lunch as our tea was at 5pm and I was already starting to get full up!

However then came the main event.  It was so beautifully presented it seemed a crime to eat it, but this was a meal in itself. 

It’s hard to critique such an array of delicacies – but I think the one thing I would say was that only having one of each thing between 2 meant we had to either pick a cake or split each in half which wasn’t always easy. We chose to split them as none of us wanted to miss out on anything!

I would like to pretend that I remembered these choices off by heart but I did have to go to the website to remember exact ingredients:

Raspberry and white chocolate pastries, Duo of chocolate cake, Miniature fancies, Raspberry and pistachio sable , Citrus and chocolate cake with blood orange foam, White chocolate shortbread lollypop ,  Mandarin and pistachio delice, Chocolate and honeycomb macaroon and  Milk chocolate griotte (never quite worked out what griotte was!) lollypop, the top layer served on a slab of white chocolate.

My favourite was the raspberry and pistachio sable which was exquisite but the citrus and chocolate cake was a close second. It took us a while but we got through it all, just not managing to finish the slab of chocolate!

The dining area was very pleasant – had a calm but buzzy ambience, relaxing background music,  staff were attentive and helpful – always seemed to be someone ready when you looked up to catch an eye.

The attention to detail in the food presentation couldn’t be faulted and we had a delightful afternoon. The 12½ % service added at the end was well worth it- I just hope the staff do actually receive their fair share of it as they truly deserved it !

Thankyou Podium we had a fine time and would be delighted to return !