Different types of tea rooms

With all of my talk about afternoon tea I have been rather neglectful of a different kind of tea room that has been emerging in Australia - that is, the Asian-style team room serving cold tea drinks that make the most perfect refreshment on a hot summer afternoon.

I recently discovered Ten-Ren's Tea Cafe (there are two of them, seemingly identical, opposite each other in Swanston Street). So far I have tried their kumquat green tea, watermelon green tea and plum green tea. My favourite is the kumquat. These cold drinks are absolutely delicious on a hot day. Next time I will try one of their cold milk tea drinks. I also love the no-nonsense decor of the cafes which feel just like they have been plucked right out of a bustling Hong Kong side street.

Iced teas are perfect for a summer afternoon. I make my own black iced tea at home by simply filling a container with cold water and putting in some of my favourite black tea leaves and leaving overnight. I then serve it poured over ice the following afternoon with a bit of fresh lemon or lime. I never add any sugar.

Afternoon tea review: The Westin Melbourne

Yesterday my generally low expectations for hotel afternoon teas in Melbourne was finally proven wrong when Tom and I enjoyed an excellent tea service in the lobby of the Westin Hotel.

The Westin does what they call a 'contemporary high tea' on weekends. Now, leaving aside this frequently perpetuated misnomer (a true high tea being a light and informal early evening meal served from a high table, as opposed to an afternoon tea or a 'low tea' served from low tables, such as this one was), I must say I was most impressed. This is easily the best value afternoon tea I have had at any Australian hotel, and among the best in terms of its excellent and interesting food and tea selections.

The light and airy foyer is a pleasant venue with lovely large windows looking over City Square and busy Swanston Street (there was a trapeze show happening in the square during our visit, which provided much diversion). The tea selection is quite interesting, focussed particularly in various green and other herbal Jing teas, although there are also a small selection of more traditional black teas. The teas are served in attractive glass pots and cups, to allow for appreciation of the tea's colours. The food was very good. It is based around some sort of healthy 'superfoods' theme, which is all earnestly explained in their menu. It really was a very generous serving, set out over not one but two three-tier platters: one for savouries and one for scones and sweets. As you may recall, I often think that afternoon tea purveyors neglect the savouries, which I often find the most enjoyable part of the meal, but that was not the case here. We had tasty meat and vegetable wraps, delicious roast pumpkin sandwiches, and lovely smoked salmon mini-bagels. The scones were served with a lovely fig jam and a strawberry jam, as well as a choice of cream or marscapone. The petit fours were small enough to eat daintily and were delicious. Service was attentive and friendly, yet also pleasingly relaxed and not uppity or stuffy.

At $45 with endless tea or coffee, it is among the pricier afternoon teas available, but the generous and delicious food selection and the interesting varieties of teas make it very good value. The Windsor charges about the same and I have to say the Westin is absolutely superior to the Windsor, which is resting on the laurels of its utterly undeserved reputation as "the" place for afternoon tea in Melbourne.

I had only one complaint: like so many other venues, the chairs at the Westin are absurdly deep and very uncomfortable. They are huge tub-style things that are impossible to sit in comfortably. I don't know why so many places insist of having these stupid low, deep chairs. At least the Windsor has comfortable high chairs at high tables - but that is the only aspect of afternoon tea that the Windsor does better than the Westin.

If not for the chairs, this tea would probably have been my first perfect score for an afternoon tea in Australia. As it is, I am giving it 8 out of 10 on the Scott Scale, which actually makes it my top-ranked Australian hotel for afternoon tea.

Incidentally, the current top Scott Scale rankings for afternoon tea are as follows:

SCOTT'S TOP TEN TEA VENUES (at Jan 2010)

Peninsula Hong Kong 9.5/10

Lovejoy's San Francisco 9/10

Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong 8/10

Westin Melbourne 8/10

Ritz-Carlton Singapore 7.5/10

Four Seasons Hong Kong 7/10

Hyatt Hotel Canberra 7/10

Langham Place Hong Kong 7/10

Regent Singapore 7/10

Sheraton on the Park Sydney 7/10

Classic catfights

Well, having posted links to some YouTube clips of Dallas the other day, I thought I should give some exposure to that other '80s supersoap, Dynasty. It did not have JR and Sue Ellen, but it did have Krystle and Alexis and their annual catfights.

The first one was the best one, when Krystle tears Alexis's studio apart after an entire season of being bullied by Alexis and snapping when she finally realised that Alexis was responsible for causing her miscarriage. It was the highlight of the 1981-82 season.

The second one is probably the most famous, and in fact I saw it at the new permanent exhibit at ACMI the other day. It is of course the lily pond.

After that they seemed to have at least one fight a year, perhaps the most innovative being a mudslide rip-off of Romancing the Stone. Over the years the somewhat tacky value of girl-on-girl action was increasingly exploited by Dynasty as Alexis was forced to battle Dominique and Sable, and the younger girls like Sammy Jo and Fallon also got their share of catfights. To me, this all seemed to be a bit low-brow, whereas these first two catfights between Krystle and Alexis were so shocking and new - no one had really seen women behave like that on TV before.

One thing that is always amusing about the Krystle/Alexis catfights, and particularly obvious in the first clip here, is how little there is of Joan Collins - it is patently obvious that most of the "Alexis" we see is a stunt person in a wig. Famously, Joan Collins hated to do any of the 'physical' scenes and used a double for all but the most necessary shots, while Linda Evans apparently loved getting into the fights and did as much of her own stunt work as possible. The violence emanating from Krystle/Linda at the end of the first clip where she smashes Alexis's portrait of Blake is truly frightening. Although the two actresses spent years claiming to be friends in real life, Joan Collins recently dished the dirt in a rather tacky article in which she claimed that Linda physically abused her during a recent 'reunion' play the two women did. I guess some of that animosity, whatever was at the core of it, must have contributed to what made the on-screen hatred between Krystle and Alexis seem so realistic. And it sure made for some good catfights.