Afternoon Tea at The Peninsula Beverly Hills

One of my favorite ladies is ending a month's vacation this week, so we decided to celebrate by going to The Peninsula Beverly Hills for afternoon tea. We've been talking about making time for afternoon tea together for a few years now, so it was great to finally do it. The Living Room where tea is served is upscale, cozy, and warm, though not opulent like The Palace Hotel in San Francisco or a Ritz Carlton.

We ordered one "Full Tea" and one "Royal Tea," which was the full tea plus strawberries and Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin (yellow label). Our two tea choices were English breakfast and Caramel Pear. We both loved the china at The Peninsula.

Afternoon tea is just so civilized! Look at the cute little tea strainers and jam pots. I did a poor job of photographing one of our favorite parts of this tea, which were the down filled tea cozies that the pots were wrapped in. Everyone being served tea had a different colored brocade tea cozy, and they did a great job of keeping the tea hot for almost two hours.

There was so much food that we ended up taking home the entire second tier of desserts and the two grilled vegetable sandwiches. Stadouts for me were the salmon (gravlax?) sandwich and plain scones.