Vintage Tea Room

Another tea from my Christmas Vacation/Saskatchewan trip backlog!

It’s not really a trip back to Regina if I don’t go to the Vintage Tea Room, which as I’ve written about before, is a English style tea room & lunch spot owned by a lovely British couple that serves the best home baked desserts, imports a lot of British foods, and of course has a lovely tea service. I lived about two blocks from it, so I frequented a lot. I’ve been to a bunch of different tea rooms now, but I’ve yet to find one that beats this one in terms of the food!

I’m almost positive that this tea was sourced from Metropolitan Tea Company; I feel like I can safely say that about 80% of the menu of teas come from there – years back I did the tracing of the tea blends. However, this was a new tea addition on their menu & I can’t find a MTC entry on Steepster or in the parts of their wholesale catalog that are public, so I’ve entered it here under the tea room’s name just in case I’m wrong…

I do believe this is a blend of black teas, primarily Darjeeling, and chamomile. It sounds like something that shouldn’t be my thing, but I asked to smell it and it was very sweet and raisin-y smelling so I was intrigued enough to order it as my tea. It was actually surprisingly delicious – smooth and forgiving, which is good ‘cause this is one of those tea houses that leaves the loose tea in the pot and gives you a strainer to use for your teacup instead of having one in the pot. It is indeed very raisin/muscatel forward, but doesn’t have the astringency/tannin that a flat out 2nd Flush would have. It’s more malty, and rounded. Then you have the chamomile; that’s a rough flavour for me and it is present in the cup but the more apple-y notes of the chamomile actually worked VERY well with the black tea combination and, shockingly to me, I didn’t mind it at all.

We also had a lot of really good food that was shared by the table (which was myself and my dad and step mom) – black currant and cranberry scones with jam and clotted cream, blueberry pie, and sour cream and raisin pie. It was a carb heavy afternoon, and it was all so incredibly rich and filling! However, as I said above, the food here is all homemade and INCREDIBLY good. I loved all of it, but those scones were SO flaky and buttery, with the perfect amount of black currant. Best scones I’ve had in a long, long time. The pies were great too; the raisin was the table favourite.

My tea ended up going perfectly with everything we ordered, which was also pretty incredible!

Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/B6oSdUOAW3V/ (Like, damn! Look at that spread!)

Went out for tea recently with my Dad at the Vintage Tea Room here in town.

We decided to split a large pot of tea, and I chose “Mulled Spice” which was a black tea. I thought it seemed sort of seasonally appropriate. Like the majority of tea from Vintage Tea Room, I’m about 90% sure that they source this from The Metropolitan Tea Company but a quick cursory glance here on Steepster didn’t reveal anything from MTC with this exact name and I’m too lazy right now to do a bigger delve into MTC’s catalog to see if I can find a match, so this is getting its own entry…

It was a relatively fine tea; really strong cinnamon and clove notes accented with hints of orange and apple that definitely gave it that mulled cider kind of flavour. Pretty sweet on its own, but also astringent which helped to temper the sweetness just a little bit.

I don’t know that I would order it again, though.