Cute location, great concept, DREAMY blueberry scones. I came to the Green Tea Room for a birthday party, which was served the pre-set, 4-course tea/food menu. Note: the menu changes monthly, and can be viewed on the company website. Reservations are strongly recommended (but really, does anyone just impulsively decide to lunch at a tea room solo anyway?).
The little restaurant and adjacent antique room were adorable, and the private parking, especially for downtown Lexington, was great (I will never get over the generosity that is free parking). Seating is limited and almost elbow-to-elbow, but that was fine.
The food: we started with a soup course, a buttery, creamy Spring Vegetable Soup. It was delicious, but a little bit of a downer to recognize that the "spring vegetables" were frozen mixed veggies (I recognize them because I cheat when I make my own veggie soup and just dump in a bag of frozen veggies - those unmistakeable little weird green bean pieces). The 2nd course was the BEST, huge, flaky, buttery, gorgeous, piping hot blueberry scone, served with lemon curd and "Lafayette" cream. Honestly, the scone was sumptuous enough it didn't need anything extra. It was my favorite item on the menu. The 3rd course was a Ky Hot Brown on a split biscuit. It tasted pretty good but the biscuit wasn't the best bread option IMO, having just had a biscuity scone (and the softness that is a Ky Hot Brown's toppings/sauce begs for a chewier, sturdier yeast bread base).
The last course was my least favorite and kind of a bummer. It was buffet-style, but it wasn't specified on the menu print-out, and after sitting around waiting and whispering to each other what we should do, a server finally explained to us that we were supposed to go into another room and get the finger sandwiches and desserts. The tea hours were almost over, so we entered an empty room with an almost bare setup with tiered platters with some picked-over mini lemon cupcakes, truffles, strawberry panna cotte and finger sandwiches. I liked the chicken salad and cucumber sandwiches very much, and pimiento cheese-stuffed celery (NO southern event is complete without pimiento cheese!). The truffles were bad: gritty, bland and unattractive (they looked like large rabbit droppings, sorry but they did).
The service was friendly, if a bit scattered and unpolished. There were about 4 different servers coming around, and there was confusion with telling us about the last course (buffet-style, rather than served to is), spilled glass of water, some of us had our tea and water refilled nonstop while others ran out.
The biggest downfall for this tea, however, was the tea! We were only served one tea, a hot herbal tea, very unimaginative and boring. I love hot tea, so I would have loved to have had several flavor options, or a different tea served per course to complement whatever we were eating. A fruit tea, spice tea, etc.
I didn't pay anything since it was a party, but I think it was about $20 a person, definitely reasonable for the amount of food we were served. read more