Fortnum & Mason: Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon - London, UK

I ate a 24-ounce steak at Mastro’s with a dessert and two sides and didn’t bat an eye. I conquered a 29-course tasting in Peru with barely a burp, and just last week, I ate ice cream before dinner and followed with three desserts.

I am gross. I have been gross all over the world, a record of shameless acts of gluttony, a smear of pins all over the map. But this isn’t just any old place, this is London. We keep it classy here.

And what could possibly be classier than afternoon tea at Fortnum and Mason? An elegant department store with a Jubilee salon on the top floor, decked in a shade of porcelain blue that makes Tiffany’s jealous...the afternoon tea is AYCE.

Challenge. Accepted. 

They have a few choices, and we split the regular Afternoon Tea and the Savory. The bottoms tiers hold the same slivers of sandwiches, and the other two switch it up. 

The lightest tea is a strategic starting point, a way to prevent early satiety. The rare tea list is seductive, and a Silver Needle Pekoe beckons, promising wonders of the Orient. The menu describes it as light and sweet, and it does have a warm comfort of barely-there baby buds - I’m told it only uses the unopened ones on the Da Bai Hao bush. 

Savory before sweet, the sandwiches first. The Coronation Chicken is my favorite, a curried salad with delicate sweet notes, the richest of the bunch. The Egg Salad is the most memorable - a rare breed of hen results in a creamier, less-sulfured egg that makes the mayo dance. Cucumber is breezy in a breathy cream cheese with mint, Ham hangs with a lighter mustard, and Smoked Salmon carries more meat and less smoke in soft, blanketing folds.

A wispy tea with finger sandwiches seems so light, but bread blows up when you add water. The fullness is already sneaking up on me as we approach the middle tier of scones. The Bacon Scone is savory, dotted with pebbles of porky fat. The Tomato Scone wears a crispy top hat of crispy cheese, a refined Ritz-cracker crunch. Both come with complementary spreads, heavy hybrids of butter and cream cheese.

The savory scones are great, but the sweet simplicity of a plain flour-butter is not to be ignored. It is dense flour through a through, something to think about when trying to pace yourself. The other scone holds the last blueberries of summer, and they taste like morning dew. The scones are the best I’ve had, but the spreads are the highlight. Clotted cream lays like a scarf of silk, enfolding a sugar-tart lemon curd or the best strawberry jam on earth. This may be the first strawberry jam I’ve ever enjoyed. 

My tea runs out, but I can barely handle another. The Yellow Buds is a compromise, a mellow from Mannong, with a clearer, more confident notes of fruit than the white.

A new tea, a refreshing transition to the top tiers; both equally rich, and both equally too much. A thick pinwheel of smoked salmon unravels a circle of cream cheese, locked-and-loaded on a gorgeous shell of macaron. The Crab Salad is a cleverly cocoon inside a hollowed eggshell. It’s heavy on the mayo, heavy on the crab, and heavy on the delicious. There is a dome of Foie Gras as well, concealed and consoled beneath a layer of rhubarb jelly. The Green Cashew Cheesecake is a strange surprise, bright and creamy with not even a hint of sugar. The final nail in the coffin is the Wild Mushroom Puff with Truffle, a cream puff encasing a thumbnail of try-the-grey-stuff-it’s-delicious.

This is where our adventure ends. Unspeakable acts of gluttony and greed were planned, but I stand defeated by a triple tier.

They graciously box up the rest for a sweet snack later on. There is a moist and buttery pound cake, an airy strawberry mousse, a well-balanced cheesecake, a passion cake with passion, and a creamy something with a rose petal on top. 

You get a slice of carriage cake at the end, a marble throne on wheels, bearing bigger delights. The Victoria Sponge is cream and air, a sweetened simplicity.

The Battenberg Cake is irresistible in its geometry, bright squares buried in an almost-fondant of marzipan. 

Fail. Epic. Fail. When in London...we FAIL. I had planned for at least another scone, but I couldn’t even clear the first. A souvenir jar of lemon curd is a poor consolation for the clotted cream I will never experience at home, and I leave defeated by nothing more than high tea at Fortnum and Mason. As for the tea, what beauty, what luxury, what sophistication! I would return to London just to relive the Jubilee...though I’d fast for at three days beforehand.