An Honest Review of Afternoon Tea in the Queens Room
On my recent transatlantic cruise upon Cunard’s Queen Mary 2, I had the pleasure of enjoying a marvelously delicious afternoon tea in the Queens Room. What a wonderful experience… or was it?
Shall we get into the honest nitty gritty?
The afternoon tea took place from 3:30 pm everyday in the Queens Room. On entering the Queens Room we were met with a beautiful ballroom, filled with small tables of 4 people per table. The room was extremely busy and we were told we would need to share with another table.
Given that we wanted to try the afternoon tea out we decided to share, but we would have preferred a table to ourselves if I’m being completely honest.
We were placed on a table with a gentleman and his partner, I believe they didn’t speak much English as despite us trying to say hello and involve them in light conversation as we joined them, and to take away the awkwardness they simply responded with a short smile and carried on drinking their tea…
What food did they serve at Afternoon Tea on the Queen Mary 2?
The Queens Room was filled with white gloved waiters rotating the tables with tea most importantly, but also trays of small sandwiches including smoked salmon, roast beef, ham and cucumber as well as others rotating with a tray of scones and clotted cream.
Now, I could fall into the trap of this being a wonderful, enchanting experience but I’ll be honest… it wasn’t that at all. In fact we had been sat for at least 15 minutes before a waiter came over to offer a sandwich, they looked a little crusty on the edges, almost as though they’d been out for far too long and were starting to get that rough, stale feel to them… So we politely declined those, but mentioned that we would love scones.
Was it worth the wait?
The waiter acknowledged and came back fairly quickly with a tray of fresh scones! How excited were we, oh my goodness, hot yummy scones…. well not quite. The waiter looked like he was heading towards us, then took a sharp left and started handing them out to other tables… every other table. In fact he fed anyone and everyone else that wanted a scone and eventually, another 10-15 minutes later made it to our table with the last four scones on the tray.
Now that’s not my issue here. My only gripe was that the scones were stone cold and had been around a room of probably 500 people (I didn’t count… but there was a lot of people!) which just gave me the heebie jeebies. I could see people pointing at scones, asking for specific ones… and I don’t know about you, but I’m not overly keen of people touching my food. So, when the last few scones made it to us, I couldn’t help but wonder how many rogue fingers had touched them.
We did eat the scones, I mean, we were there for the experience and despite me mentioning they were cold. It’s still a scone at the end of the day and scones are simply scrumptious.
So was it worth it? Well, yes and no… we can now say we had Afternoon Tea in the Queens Room on the Queen Mary 2. Would we do it again? We were on a 7 day cruise and we did not go back after our initial experience, primarily because it was just so busy and we could get fresher, warmer scones from the Kings Court buffet.