Ye Olde King's Head Afternoon Tea, Santa Monica, CA

Ye Olde King's Head
116 Santa Monica Blvd, Santa Monica, CA 90401
310-451-1402
http://www.yeoldekingshead.com/
Plenty of nearby lot of structure parking.
Casual dining and pub.

Visited: Afternoon Tea: February 2010
Visited: Pub, several times

Ye Olde King's Head has Afternoon Tea every Saturday from 2-5. We're always looking for a fun place to have English Afternoon Tea, so we were glad to be invited here for a special event.

There is one set Traditional Afternoon Tea menu (meat or vegetarian) for $15.95 meaning that you don't have a choice between how large a tea meal you want or any options within the menu.

You do have a choice of tea: Earl Grey, Darjeeling, or a House Blend of black teas. Each person gets their own pot with a shared tea leaf strainer. Milk and cute little sugar cubes are on the table. They do refill your pot with hot water if desired, and that was a nice touch.

On to the meal...Because we were a large group, the tiered trays were brought to be shared between 2 or 3 persons, which was nice to conserve space. However, we did end up with quite a number of tiered trays on the table and after a while it was hard to see each other.

The top plate of our tea tier was a scone with what looked like currants but tasted more like raisins. The scone was served with a dish of jam (to share) and what I thought was a dish of Devonshire cream but was in fact cream cheese! Quite shocking, I say. A nice dish of butter would have been better. But since I don't like either jam or dairy spread on my scone, I thought the scone was rather plain and dry.

Also on the top tray was a mini quiche and a slice of a sausage roll. Both of which were warm and very tasty. It would have been nice to have a full sausage roll, as that is something uniquely British and would have been a great treat.

The next tier down were our sandwiches. Overall, the ratio of bread to filling was very high on the fluffy bread side. The sandwich flavors were cucumber-cream cheese, egg salad, and something called Indian chutney with grated cheddar cheese (I thought this was very odd, kinda sweet and salty, but some others seemed to really like it).

The bottom tier was dessert. There were two different types of sliced cake. Very tender cake with cream fillings.

Overall, it was fun to try out their Afternoon Tea, but I won't be back.