Salla VartiainenAfternoon Tea review – Maison Ladurée Champs Élysées Paris
If you have read my past blogs you probably know that I got hooked on Afternoon Tea after experiencing it in London last year!
Not only do I love trying out the different teas, I also like the cakes and the atmosphere and just spending time in beautiful environments. So now when we are in Paris, I thought it would be nice to try out a Parisian version of the afternoon tea.
I´m having afternoon tea at The Royal Drury Lane in London
About Maison Ladurée
Maison Ladurée is somewhat like a landmark in Paris. It was founded in 1862 and is best known for their Macarons, a small french pastry made of two sandwich-style meringue based “cookies” filled with jam, ganache or buttercream.
Here in Sweden we had some kind of macaron-craze around 2010 when macarons were everywhere and everyone was trying to bake them, but after that they kind of disappeared again.
Maison Ladurée are also the inventors of the Parisian tea-room and today they have over 90 tea-rooms all over the world!
The venue – Maison Ladurée at Champs Elysées Paris
We arrive to Maison Ladurée 15 minutes before our booking. It´s early afternoon and there is a small queue outside of the entrance. My first impression, when we step inside, is that the Ladurée shop looks like a beautiful orangerie.
Celadon green espaliers cover the walls, big flower arrangements highlights beautiful boxes of delicious products, the ceiling has stucco and a part of it is painted to resemble a heaven with clouds.
The waitress asks us to look around in the store while our table is being prepared and we buy cute boxes of Ladurées signature macarons to our loved ones back home.
Sooo difficult to choose! We ended up asking the shop assistant to do a mix for us 🙂
The tea room at Maison Ladurée
Our table is ready and we proceed to the second floor. A waitress shows us to our table. The atmosphere is more calm here with low violinmusic in the background. The orangerie theme continues, and the espaliers here are covered with different types of flowers. If you are a princess this is a perfect place for you.
The other guests are mostly couples and families, and I hear them speaking Spanish, Turkish, French and Finnish. Some are here for lunch, while others are enjoying tea and treats.
The tea room is designed by Jacques Garcia, a famous french interior designer know for designing the interiors of hotels like the Hotel Maison Souquet and Hotel Costes.
Afternoon tea at Maison Ladurée
There are two menus on our table. The first one is the Afternoon Tea menu and the second is the regular menu. We start by choosing teas. Here you only get to pick one tea, unlike in London where many of the afternoon tea venues let you pick one tea per savory and sweet dish.
I end up picking a green tea with rose, orange blossom, mint and ginger and Buba chooses a green tea with bergamot, rhubarb and caramel. The tea comes in in heavy silver pots and the fragrance and taste of my tea is heavenly! I try to see if they collaborate with some tea brand, but I don´t find any info on the menu.
The waitress brings us our first dish, it is Croque-Monsieur Ladurée which consists of two rolled up toasts. One with cheddar and one with turkey. It is good, but nothing special.
Whilest the English afternoon tea usually has a very balanced selection of sandwiches, scones and sweets, Maison Ladurées tea is strongly focused on sweets! All the sweets have been composed by Julien Alvarez the pastry chef at Maison Ladurée.
What is this?! The first sweet dish is a small bowl of foam! It turns out to be a coffee flavored ice cream dish and the foam is flavored with coconut. Again, the dish is good but not very exceptional.
We got a bowl of foam!
Next the waitress brings us two items, a milk chocolate and hazelnut soufflé tart from Lot de Garonne and a savoy cake with muscovado sugar and crème chantilly. The soufflé tart is very heavy and very sweet and we don´t finish it. The Savoy cake is more balanced. The tea room is slowly starting to fill up with people and our weitress gets busy.
The waitress dissapears and it takes some time before we get our forth serving.
But then she brings us a very interesting strawberry and basil sorbet and a small strawberry and orange blossom tart. The strawberry and basil sorbet was defently my favorite of all the dishes. It was an unexpected combination which worked very well.
It contained, what I originally thought was peas, but reading the menu I later understood it must have been some kind of sprouts. That may sound weird, but it actually worked really well with rest of the dish!
Now we are super full so when the fifth serving, macarons, come in, we ask to get them to go, because we can´t possibly fit even a crumb!
We thank our waitress, pack down our to-go macarons and head downstairs. Louis Ernest Ladurée him self smiles at us from a frame right next to the front door. He looks sympathetic and has a impressive mustasch. It is almost like he greets us “Thank you for the visit! I hope you enjoyed it!”.
Score 3.7
We visited on a Wednesday and the tea costed 65 euro per person.
The total score of 3.7 is based on the following parameters.
Food 3.5
Atmosphere 4
Service 3.5
First impression 4
Price 3.5
xoxo/Salla V
YOu may also like this post about Paris for Tea Lovers!