Anger Burger

Since our time here in NZ is drawing to a close, we thought it best if we cut the crap and had some damn high tea already.  Our pal Marika heartily suggested the Hippopotamus, a restaurant inside the delightfully quirky Museum Hotel in downtown Wellington (which, while I can’t vouch for prices, certainly had a great lobby).

I watched as a teenage girl at another table pulled a award-winning bershon and flicked the quenelle of paté from the top of her savory, like this one, as though it were cat food

High tea is awash with contradictions, misunderstandings and social commentaries, which makes is best just to sort of ignore whatever history¹ accompanies it and run with pretending we are all little girls at invisible tea parties (hmm, that’s the second time this week I’ve mentioned invisible tea…).

I lost count of how many cups of Ceylon tea I drank, but it was more than four and less than six.

I’d also sort of terrified Marika previously by, at home, brewing my cups of tea until they were the density of espresso.  I’d forgotten until we were served our first cups at Hippopotamus that proper English tea is pale and served with milk so as to keep from overpowering the delicate qualities, but to my surprise it was just as delightful as the ungodly rocketfuel tea I make.

I was a hair sad to see the savories limited to three smears of something on tiny toasts and only one miniature tea sandwich, but it’s the kind of sadness that comes with three cascading levels of high-fat pastry, which is to say: fleeting.

I’ve also gained an appreciation for friands, which are hugely popular in New Zealand.  In the photo above, they are the little cakes dusted with powdered sugar.  Almost every cafe sells them here, each version a slight variation on another, some better than others but all of them pretty great with tea or coffee.  Traditionally, friands are actually financiers, or light brown-butter sponge cakes made with almond meal.  When made correctly they are crispy on the outside – almost as though fried – and spongy and nutty on the inside.  They are, in a way, a kind of hearty madeleine, made heartier by the New Zealand predilection for amping them up with fruit and tropical flavors.

Afterwards, sloshy with tea, we walked along the waterfront to try and encourage digestion.  Still, when I saw a soft-serve ice cream truck that served affogato, I had to be dragged away, for my own safety.

¹Basically, high tea was initially a meal of the starving lower classes who would eat the scraps of their lunches with tea late in the evening after hard labor.  Later, this was called high tea literally because it was eaten at a higher table than a classic “low tea” where everyone sat around holding their cups and saucers in their laps.  Later still it became a derogatory term for froofy upperclass snacktime (say “high tea!” to yourself in your best old British aristocracy voice and you get the idea) and has now become, in America and New Zealand at least, a beloved pastime of eating tiers of snacks while drinking bottomless tea at hotel restaurants.  The British apparently still call this “afternoon tea.”  I could ask the British man sitting downstairs from me as I write this, but I’m too lazy to walk down there.