Greetings all, or as we say here in Yorkshire - Ey up!
Today I'll talk about the sumptuous food eaten on Wednesday 20th August. The first line in my journal for this day reads: 'The rain, rain, rain, came down, down, down...'
Yes, Fay was still going strong and the ponchos were still out! Our party split up for most of the day. Si and Kate were off to Typhoon Lagoon - nice and quiet apparently - no one goes swimming when it's raining! - and Sarah and I went back into the Magic Kingdom. Sarah had a fixation about finding Alice (as in Wonderland) but after having spotted her near the teacups on the first day she had vanished. We had no luck on this day but contented ourselves with going on lots of rides and meeting other characters.
At 10:30 we went to Columbia Harbour House again for some brunch. Sarah tried the Anchors Aweigh tuna sandwich and I had the chicken nuggets again. It was pretty much deserted in there again and so we had a nice mother/daughter chat and put the worlds to rights while we dried off a tad. I was very British and had a nice hot cup of tea!
We went on a few more rides after brunch and then went back to the resort to rest and watch some more Disney channel goodness.
At 2pm Sarah and I left the room to go for our afternoon tea at the Grand Floridian. We went back to MK and caught the monorail to GF - our first and only monorail trip of the holiday!
We got to the GF early and had a bit of a wander round. Then we checked in at the Garden View room. At the podium the lady asked if we were staying at the GF. I told her no, we were at CBR.
'Oh...' was all she said and then launched into her practised spiel.
The room was very pretty in a chintzy kind of way. And very quiet, for most of the tea we were the only ones there - I think it was later on than most people usually go. Our server was nice. Very nice. Super nice. Nice nice nice. Just that little bit too nice....you know what I mean? (And I'm a big fan of nice but it was too much for me even!)
Well, one of the reasons we had gone for tea here was so Sarah could have the trifle - she loves trifle and it's a stable of many an english afternoon tea (believe me, not that we have tea like this at home!).
Well, I must have missed something on the menu because the server kept asking if I was over 21. I suddenly twigged she was talking about the trifle. Sarah couldn't have the trifle because it had alcohol in it!! Of course we always have sherry trifle in England without a second thought! This is Sarah's face when she realised she couldn't have the trifle:
A disgruntled 14 year old? Not good. To be fair, she was hamming it up somewhat and wasn't really that grumpy. But she was disappointed.
Anyway, we decided to make the best of things and order off the a la carte menu.
I had the Mad Hatter tea which was lovely:
Sarah ordered a plate of tea sandwiches which we shared:
These were quite tasty but bizarre sandwich fillings. The little onion tart was nice. I ordered a cheese plate:
This was really good and you got lots of cheese. Because of the lack of trifle we ordered scones with jam and cream each. All the way through our savoury food the server kept wanting to bring out the scones. There wasn't really room for any more plates on our table and we were still eating our cheese and sandwiches but we couldn't help feeling that she wanted to hurry us along.
The scones were delicious - lovely and warm with proper devonshire cream. They were quite small though and we wished we'd ordered two each!! They were the best part of the tea:
Here is me drinking my tea - you can't tell but I was holding my pinky out as is proper:
We were both given a beautiful pink rose which we had to carry around in the rain for the rest of the day. We got lots of nice comments and they survived in our room until we left!:
As we were eating another family came in. A woman with two younger girls who had been to the BBB and were completely Princess-i-fied. Cute! I can't help feeling that this family seemed to get a bit more attentive service than Sarah and I. I felt sad that this was the first WDW place that we felt slightly looked down upon. I felt even more sad that Sarah noticed this too. My daughter might not be wearing a princess outfit but she is friendly and polite and got so much fun out of this trip to WDW. Nearly everywhere we went (Signature restaurants included) she (and all of us) were made to feel welcome and comfortable.
What had meant to be a relaxing Mum and daughter experience turned out to be quite a rushed experience. Would you believe we were out of there in just over 30 minutes?
So, the quality of the food was good. The surroundings were nice but the service was disappointing.
Sarah and I had a little chuckle that we were made to feel that we weren't good enough to experience English afternoon tea....what with us being English and all!
I know many people have posted on this forum about having a lovely time at the Garden View cafe and maybe on another day, at another time, (with another server) we might have done too. I'm glad we went but it's not somewhere we would go back to.
Our experience here had an implication for a later ADR - as you will see!
Shari xx
Great taste! My husband and I are in talks about when a good time to go back would be. He would like to go every year but I like to save the magic and go back less often - I would hate for it to become routine! Having said that...I'd probably jump at the chance to go back next year! It looks like 2010 or 2011 for us.
