Important things you Must know before having afternoon tea in London

If you're planning on doing afternoon tea on your London trip, there are a few things you need to know so you don't end up feeling out of place, confused, or breaking afternoon tea etiquette. By the way, I'm Jess, the founder of Love in London and I've lived in London since 2013 and I've done a lot of afternoon teas. So let's start with what actually is afternoon tea. It's a very British tradition that started back in the 1840s and is credited to Anne, the 7th Duchess of Bedford. At that time, dinner in upper-class households was served pretty late around 8 or 9 p.m. and Anne would start to get hungry around 4 o'clock. Totally understandable. So she started to request that some snacks like sandwiches, sweet treats, and sometimes cakes would be brought up to her room around 4 o'clock. Eventually, she started inviting her friends to this little shindig and it became a fashionable social event among the aristocracy and eventually spread to hotels and tea rooms around the country. These days, afternoon tea is generally done by tourists and sometimes by Londoners for like a special occasion or if you just want to have a fancy day out but it's definitely not part of our regular routine. So what do you need to know before you do afternoon tea? First things first, come hungry. Most afternoon teas are made up of little finger sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, and little cakes and pastries as well as tea on the side. And while that may not sound like a lot, I'm telling you it is a lot of food. I promise you, you will fill up. So I recommend not having any lunch before you go to afternoon tea and definitely not planning a large dinner too soon after you have it because you will be stuffed. I'm telling you will be stuffed. Now if you don't want to eat that much food, some venues will allow you to order one stand of food per person but it kind of just depends on each place. You would have to reach out to them to see if they would allow that and you shouldn't expect to be able to do that at the really popular and most famous and expensive afternoon teas like at the Ritz and Claridge's. And for my solo travelers, you can do afternoon tea by yourself at most places. I know you guys asked me this a lot if it's possible to do it on your own and most venues will allow this. The quickest and easiest way to work this out is to go to the venue's website and see if you can make a reservation for just one person. Even if it doesn't allow you to do that and the minimum is two, you can still reach out to a venue, call them or email them and ask them if they can accommodate you. What do you wear to afternoon tea? In London, it ranges from smart casual to quite fancy and it depends on where you go. If you're going somewhere iconic and luxurious like the Ritz or Claridge's, you will need to be dressed up and they have a pretty strict dress code. No jeans, no trainers aka sneakers and for men a jacket and a tie is usually required. Each venue will have all of this info on their website in detail because they want you to be dressed nice. For more modern and more relaxed tea spots with price points between like 35 and 55 pounds per person, it's not as fancy and they don't usually have a formal dress code. However, afternoon tea is kind of an occasion so most people will be dressed up at least smart casual. So think like a nice dress or a nice blouse with trousers or if you're a man, you could go with nice trousers and like a clean, crisp, crisp, crisp short. Again, this information will usually be in like the FAQs on the website of the venue you're looking at and generally speaking, avoid anything overly casual. So no flip-flops, no jeans and no gym wear. Even if there's no official dress code, like I said, most people will be dressed up because it's a bit of an occasion thing so you'll want to be as well and I would plan your afternoon tea experience on a day where you have time to go back to your hotel and change out of your exploring clothes so you can be dressed for the part. Okay, now this one is important. Do not call it high tea. High tea and afternoon tea are two different things. Historically, high tea was an evening meal served to working-class families at a high table and had a lot of meaty options like meat pie. Today, high tea in London has a savory meat course in between these sandwiches and the sweet treats. However, there's basically very few venues that will even offer high tea. I think it's like the Savoy and Fortnum & Mason that have it as an option so 95% of you watching this will end up doing afternoon tea so make sure you call it afternoon tea. Got it? You need to book your afternoon tea in advance. The most popular places for afternoon tea like Sketch, Claridge's, Fortnum & Mason tend to book up weeks or months in advance especially if you're visiting during the summer or if you want to go on a weekend so do not wait to book those. Like even look like three or four months ahead of time if you have specific dates that you want to do it. If you're not as fussed about the venue that you have your afternoon tea in or if you're just going to go for something a bit more casual than the big ones then you're usually fine to book a bit closer to the time but I would still have a look maybe four weeks out so you can make sure you get the day and time that you want. By the way, every afternoon tea venue has booking online. It's very easy to do and many of them will make you put in your credit card information because they do have a cancellation policy which means that if you cancel or don't show up within a certain amount of time you will be charged so make sure you read that. It's very clearly stated on each booking page but be aware of that. Also I know with things like afternoon tea, restaurant reservations, tickets for certain attractions, it can be hard to know what are the things you definitely have to book and buy in advance because you'll miss out if you don't or what are the things that you could just go to on a whim if you have some free time while you're in London. It's stressful and takes up a lot of time to try to research that very specific information for every single thing you're gonna do in London and then when you find it you're like, is this like even accurate? Well I make that information super clear in my booking and tickets tracker so that you know exactly what you need to buy and book in advance, what things that you could try to book in advance but it's not totally necessary, and which places you can save for when you just want to walk in somewhere without having a plan. The booking and tickets tracker comes as part of our Notion template which will automatically populate with the places that you do need to book in advance depending on which of my recommendations you have added the must-do or might-do tag to. It's very handy, I love that bit. It also comes as a printable worksheet in case you want to do it the old-fashioned way. The booking and tickets tracker comes with our London travel guides like the London itinerary which is planned your entire trip for you in a flexible way, great for first-timers, and the casual tourist guides for the travelers that just want to explore the locally loved hidden gems all around the city, all the places that I love to go to. So save yourself time, confusion, and missing out on the things that you definitely want to do while you're in London by grabbing one of our London travel guides. To find out more scan the QR code that's popping up over here or click the link down in the description box of this video. Afternoon tea etiquette that you should follow. Afternoon tea is traditionally eaten in a certain order. If you get a tiered stand, you'll always start at the bottom and that's where all the finger sandwiches and savory bits will be. Then you'll go to the middle for the scones, then the sweet treats and the cakes are at the top. So you do it in that order. Sometimes it comes out on the tiered tray but also sometimes they bring it out in different courses so you kind of can't mess it up. When you eat your scones, don't cut them with a knife, you kind of just like twist them like this, although I will admit I usually forget about this. And then you will put the cream and the jam onto each side of the scone. Now in the UK there's a huge argument on whether you do the cream first or the jam first. It actually doesn't matter which you do as long as you do the cream because that's what I do and I'm always right. Hold your teacup by the handle but there's no need to stick a pinky out that's like really I promise you that's on a thing and you'll look silly if you do it. And also if you need to stir your tea like with the milk and the sugar that you put in, instead of stirring around it's proper etiquette to like go back and forth like this instead. It's not a huge deal but if you want to be very proper that's how you do it. When do they serve afternoon tea? Most places will do it between like 12 30 and 4 30 ish although some of the most popular places are now offering it as an option around dinner time which to me feels weird because afternoon tea is a daytime thing but I think they're just trying to like make more money since there's so much demand so I would stick with doing it at daytime. I think 1 30 is nice because then it's like you kind of make it as lunch. What to do if you have dietary requirements? Okay so if you're vegan, vegetarian, or gluten-free most venues these days can accommodate for that you just have to let them know in advance so they can prep. Sometimes they don't even need to prep. If you have any dietary requirements beyond that a lot of venues can again cater to this but you will need to let them know in advance so that they can make some swaps and changes. Can you bring kids to afternoon tea? Some places won't allow it while others are very child-friendly. Even some of the more luxurious ones cater to kids which is great. I'm going to be talking more about this in my next video in this afternoon series which is where I'll be recommending which types of tea are good for what so have a watch of that next. You don't have to drink tea. Now every afternoon tea will come with a menu of teas to choose from and I do highly recommend that you try at least one tea even if you don't think that you like tea because you're already paying for it and maybe you just didn't like bad tea and you're about to try really good tea but if you really don't want to have tea most places will let you have coffee instead or you could just stick to water. Some venues will give you free refills. Now the more higher end places will tend to come once you finish say your sandwiches and say would you like additional sandwiches and they'll ask about the scones and the sweet treats. Now I know this is tempting but remember this is already a lot of food so choose carefully if you do decide to get seconds on anything. I usually say yes to a sandwich or two and then by the time I get to the sweets I want to explode so keep that in mind. Some of the higher end places will let you take some stuff home however they won't let you take the finger sandwiches so if you were planning on taking those home which is usually the ones I want to take home because I'm like I can have those for breakfast tomorrow morning they won't allow it. How much does afternoon tea cost? Okay so at a luxury hotel you can expect this to run anywhere from 70 pounds per person up to 115, 120, 125 pounds per person. That's like the highest that you're gonna find. Then the smaller tea rooms and like the more mid-range places can be anywhere between 35 pounds per person up to like 50 or 60 pounds per person. Also keep in mind that there will always be a service charge added onto your bill. This is usually between 12 and a half and 15 percent. It's optional but unless you have very very bad service you're gonna pay it and don't tip anything beyond that. That is your tip you don't need to leave anything on top of it. There is no best afternoon tea. I've done a lot of great afternoon teas and there are so many really good ones around the city at different price points and that give you different experiences so there's really like not even like a top three that I think you'll get in London. There's so many good options no matter what you're looking for and in the next video in the series I'm gonna tell you about some of the best ones that I do recommend for things like a traditional experience, one that's good for kids, one that is good for people who don't like sweet treats. So you can get all those recommendations and more if you click on this box that's popping up here to watch that video or if you're watching this really early it might not be available yet and in that case you should click here and watch this video which is where I tried the three most famous afternoon teas in London where I honestly review them and I let you know if they're worth the crazy price tag that comes with it. So click one of those here and I'll see you in the next video. Bye!