Essential ingredients: a day in the life of a successful tea room

17th September 2013

Have you ever wondered what it is like running a tea room? Catherine Whyte goes behind the scenes to find out more.

Owning a tea room is a career choice many people fantasise about. After all, it must be wonderful to be surrounded by scrumptious cakes, fluffy scones and oodles of tea every day. It's certainly a romantic image, but how true to life is it?

Who better to ask than two of the Tea Guild's most successful members; George and Rachel Peacock, the husband and wife team behind Ely's famous Peacock's Tea Room, winners of the Tea Guild's Top Tea Place Award in 2007 and Nikki Renwick-Fumagalli, Deputy Bar and Lounge Manager at The Goring Hotel in London, whose excellent afternoon teas earned them the top spot in this year's Tea Guild Top London Afternoon Tea Award.

It becomes clear that a good starting point is passion for tea and this applies to whether or not the business is a family-run tea room in the Cambridgeshire countryside or a five-star hotel in the nation's capital city.

At Peacocks, George is in charge of selecting the teas - a job he evidently relishes.

"One of our quirks is that we try to have tea from as far a-field as possible," he says. Indeed, Peacocks serves tea from every continent on the planet. It is no mean feat sourcing some of the rarer teas, he admits, and it is his job to keep an eye on which teas are out of favour with his customers. He updates the menu on an annual basis and appears to take great delight in writing the notes, which are an invaluable guide for customers.

He certainly makes them sound appealing. Who could resist a cup of Pleine Lune, which George describes as "our favourite French tea; almonds, vanilla, honey etc; OTT & wonderful." Or one of the tea room's increasingly popular white teas, Formosa Peach, described as "a light liquor with a slightly peachy aftertaste, from large ragged leaves of tea".

In contrast, the tea menu at The Goring has stayed constant since it was decided four years ago. For Nikki though, her challenge is to make sure that the hotel's numerous waiting staff are always fully trained up.

"We do regular tea trainings and tea tastings with the staff to make sure that they are up to speed and able to advise the guests,' says Nikki. "A lot of Italian students join our staff and as coffee is very popular in Italy, many of them come to us with limited tea knowledge - it's nice to see how much they enjoy discovering the nation's favourite brew!"

It goes without saying that there would be no afternoon tea without the sandwiches, scones and cakes. The kitchen of any successful tea room is a busy, well-organised place.

"Rachel is often in the kitchen before 8 am," says George. "It would be lovely to have staff to do it all for us, but it doesn't work out that way I'm afraid. The first thing Rachel does is to make sure that the scones are made, then the cakes, and that there's enough food for the day."

The kitchen is in full swing right throughout the day, and while Rachel largely devotes herself to the baking, George "potters around" making sure everything in the front of house and garden is "up to scratch" once the customers come flooding in at 10.30am. Doors close at 5pm.

At The Goring, afternoon tea only takes up a relatively small slice of the day - it is served from 3pm to 5.30pm - but the kitchen is constantly busy.

"The day runs to a tight schedule," says Nikki. "First there's the lunch crowd, then we serve afternoon tea, and then we move onto pre-dinner drinks and then supper. In addition, we get a lot of people just coming in for tea and scones. We are constantly on the go."

It follows then that an important aspect of Nikki's job is to book just the right numbers in so that the kitchen is not over-stretched.

"We don't book in more than 40 covers," explains Nikki. "Our chefs are busy looking after the lunch service in the bar, and they are also preparing desserts for the restaurant in that small time slot so we don't take any more than that. Everything runs smoothly that way."

It's a balancing act that George and Rachel also have off pat. During high summer the Peacock's kitchen is at full stretch serving its sixty covers.

"People ask us why we don't put more tables outside,' says George, "but the kitchen couldn't manage if we did. Most of the time there's a nice balance."

So there you have it. Tea rooms don't succeed without these essential ingredients: dedication, passion and sheer hard work. But the effort pays off, especially come April when the Tea Guild announces its yearly awards.

"Every year lovely new tearooms appear, and it would be greedy for us to expect to get the top award twice, " says George, "but each year since 2007 we have received an Award of Excellence to confirm we haven't let our standards slip."

"It's nice to know we are doing something right!"