royal copenhagen tea lounge

Having frequently passed by the discreet entrance of the Royal Copenhagen Tea Lounge at the 2nd level of Takashimaya in the last 14 years, I have not once had the urge to go in, kind of like the guy you always see on the train to work in the morning but never talk to, just the cold glance of acknowledgement. It really looks like a pleasant place from the outside, but you don't really much of the place beyond the cake counter where the space turns a corner to the back of the Burberry store.

It was a random decision to meet a few friends at the Tea Lounge after lunch (yes, straight after!) one Saturday afternoon, a sudden impulse to visit this "new" old place, to find out what lingers beyond the cake counter. The space turned out much larger than what the small entrance suggested, stretching in almost 20m in with tables lined on both sides of the space, perhaps long and narrow are a better words to describe the space than large. The interior is tastefully decorated, furniture with clean lines and white washed walls with a few pieces of art work, it exudes what I call nordic underwhelmingness (pardon my gross cultural generalization, and also allow me t invoke the Swedish word lagom).

Though having previously lived in a couple of Nordic cities for some time, I have absolutely no conception of what a Nordic "tea" might entail. Only cardamom buns and skoleboller come to mind but both were not be found at the place, unfortunately. We ordered, to share among the four of us, 2 tea sets which included a few slices of cakes, scones and Danish jams, spinach quiche, tuna and cold shrimp open face sandwiches, coffee and tea. Save for the open-face sandwiches, the items sounded more English than Danish though I would say that any one of the items would likely be fairly common in the Nordic countries. Among the things we had, the green tea cake particularly stood out to me, the rich flavour of the green tea, moderately sweet with a slight bitterness encased within the slab of dense green foam, no gimmicks, simple but excellent.

The place started to fill up during mid afternoon and as I was enjoying my earl grey tea, I noticed the crowd was mostly female, many of the tai-tai variety. I suppose having scones with strawberry jam, sipping tea from fine china is not, by most standards, the most testosterone-laden activity.

Royal Copenhagen Tea Lounge
Takashimaya
391 Orchard Road, Level 2