Christina Hamlett
User's reviews
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Rose Tree Cottage
In the distance, the 1st Movement of Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto #3 underscores the elegant ambiance of the experience that is about to unfold. There are no cellphones, no noisy conversations to compete with the occasional glance of silver spoons against the interior of Royal Daulton china cups. Seated nearby, an impeccably dressed older lady leaned in to her younger companion to quietly remark, “This is the way things used to be.” Across the table from me, my husband added his own observation. “This is also the way it should be.” The Queen of England herself would feel at home here. Like ourselves, she’d probably soon forget she was in Pasadena at all, much less that the nearest neighbors were two supermarkets and the requisite Starbucks-on-every-corner. At Rose Tree Cottage—the city’s original and most enduring tea room—proprietors Mary and Edmund Fry have been serving up stylishness and scones for nearly three decades. L.A. Magazine, Victoria and U.S.A. Today have sung the shop’s praises; Restaurant Guild International enthusiastically awarded it five stars in its recognition of America’s most celebrated tea rooms. Everything in the shop, our gracious host explains, is either English, Welsh, Irish or Scottish. The hand-crafted chairs are English yew and elmwood. The china from which we sip our tea is “Blossom Time,” a pattern which we are informed has been discontinued. It’s impossible not to be caught up in the charming cadence of Edmund’s London accent. “We’re in an age,” he says with unabashed candor, “when people are so used to drinking out of Styrofoam cups, using paper napkins and eating giant fistfuls of food with their hands that they eventually end up slopping all over their shoes.” If the patrons who have posted negative want to go somewhere else with their cell phones, noisy conversations, unruly children and bad manners, there's no shortage of other establishments that can accommodate them. Rose Tree Cottage and Edmund and Mary are simply the best when it comes to upper-crust service.