Atlantica - 01.12.2006, Side 46

44 AT L A N T I CA
“HOW WAS LONDON?” I asked my mother over
the phone. It was a week before I was going to
visit for the first time, and my mom, who lives
in California, had recently returned from one of
those epic Scandinavian cruises and spent a week-
end there en route.
“Oh, London was nice.”
Uh-oh, I thought. She sounded unimpressed.
“How was tea?” I remembered that she and
her travel companion – both women in their 60s
– had booked one of those high teas at a fancy
London hotel.
“Welllll,” she began, “Tea was a little... disap-
pointing. The hotel didn’t have our reservation on
the books, and we were there on a holiday, so they
weren’t doing a real tea.”
“Oh.”
“But the waiter was very nice,” – here, the
familiar tone of martyrdom – “and managed to
put something together for us. Some little sand-
wiches and things.”
MY MOM’S WEEKEND may have been a flop,
but within my first afternoon cruising the city,
I was taken. A cashier called me “Luv,” and I
swooned. Brickery Lane buzzed with the tattoo
guns of the city’s second annual international
tattoo convention. The weekend I arrived, at
the moment when the warm lull of summer has
ended and fall’s crisp sends Londoners on their
way one beat faster, fruit stands were set out on
the sidewalk selling squash and fresh figs.
Tattoos, f igs, and an army of Starbucks.
London evidently has the second highest density
of Starbucks in the world, and the green awnings
were everywhere.
Every guidebook to London comes with a list
of grand old hotels where a visitor can step back
into the heyday of the British Empire at a well-
appointed table for afternoon tea. “Tea” in these
institutions is an event containing small sandwich-
es, scones served with clotted cream or lemon
curd, pastries and, of course, loose-leaf tea. The
Ritz, the Savoy, Claridge’s and the Dorchester are
all regulars on the lists.
Growing up in Los Angeles, I craved the sense
of tradition that seemed to be infused in colder,
older cities like Boston or London. I would drag
my mother to afternoon tea at hotels in Los
Angeles like the Biltmore, where neat rows of
crust-off cucumber sandwiches and mini éclairs
brought me a sense of old-world sophistication.
I may have rolled my eyes at my mom’s dissat-
isfaction with her less than storybook tea episode,
THE TWEE OF TEA
Acquiring the taste for afternoon tea in London.

By Krista Mahr
Photos by Áslaug Snorradóttir
044-51 LondonAtl606.indd 44 18.10.2006 22:33:35