tl;dr Lily's & Elise is a well-decorated place to have afternoon tea/high tea. The menu selection…read moreis wide enough to have something to satisfy most people. I don't think you'd have a bad time here, but I don't think the experience is likely to blow you away.
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Ambiance (4.5/5):
The vibe is very pink, cute, and girly; I imagine that it'd make a great place to celebrate a special occasion with a group of your friends. It's currently February, but every table had fresh flowers in a vase, which really added to the overall ambiance.
The only thing I didn't love was that the table that we were sat at was visibly dusty. There was quite a bit of debris on the table, booth chair, and a bit on the teacup saucers. We suspect it was probably stuff from a vent that was above the table. We chose not to make a big deal about it (there's a note inside the menu asking for some understanding for being short-staffed) and just dusted off the table ourselves, but I can imagine that this might be upsetting to others.
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Food (3.5/5):
We (party of 2) opted to do the mini afternoon tea, which is a selection off 2 savories of our selection and 3 sweets selected by the chef, as well as two pots of tea for the group.
For our savories, we selected cucumber and cream cheese and the turkey. The cucumber and cream cheese was just fine; the bread was a smidge dry, but otherwise an average tea sandwich. The turkey, however, was really excellent. It came as a mini croissant sandwich and the ingredients inside just all really worked well together.
The sweets for us were 2 mini blueberry scones, 2 mini chocolate chip cookies, and 2 different macaron flavors, as well as 2 strawberries. Overall, the sweets were just fine. The scone was very moist, which I don't mind, but I think for an afternoon tea, I prefer it a smidge less moist so that I can have some clotted cream with it. The macarons were also fine, sitting somewhere between the ones at Whole Foods and the ones from Ladurée/similar. For us, the chocolate chip cookie was the least fun of the bunch; they reminded us of a mini version of the ones from Tate's Bake Shop, which is fine, but not quite what I'm looking for at tea.
The teas were fine, just as we expected. We had ordered a fruitier one that ended up being more tart than expected, so we appreciated that there was honey at the table already.
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Service (4/5):
The staff were friendly and fairly attentive. They brought us our second pot without us having to ask and let us know that if we were welcome to fresh teacups if we wanted. We were fine continuing to use our cups, but I appreciated the thought. The food also didn't take too long to come out.
One thing that wasn't clear on the menu is that you have to agree on the savory selection for maybe the whole table? We were a party of 2, so I'm not sure if they handle it differently for a larger group. When perusing the menu, we had originally planned to select 4 different savories (2 each), but they came to take our order, they let us know that we both had to have the same 2 selections. I understand it's more efficient, but if I'd been out with people who had different palates or dietary needs than mine, I wouldn't have been too thrilled.
We were also told that the pots of tea would come out one at a time and if we had a preference on which came first. They didn't make it seem like I could ask for both pots at the same time, but I saw another table of 2 receive two pots at the same time, so maybe I should've asked anyway. We have completely different preferences for tea (one of us doesn't drink caffeine and the other doesn't really like fruity teas), so having us share both pots kind of dampened our experience.