It didn’t take long for Ethel and I to decide where to meet now that I’m back – she sent me a link to the Japanese Afternoon Tea at Pan Pacific and I immediately said yes. I love Japan and I love afternoon tea, so this pairing seemed like a match made in heaven.

Since this afternoon tea is available from noon onwards, we decided to have this as our lunch (and there’s enough that we were full by the end). We were really lucky and managed to be seated in a really nice pod in the atrium!

Tea Review

We chose to add $10 to our set to get the Copenhagen Sparkling Tea – this tea was really interesting because it came in something that looked like a champagne bottle. The tea also looks like champagne to my admittedly wine-amateur eyes. In terms of taste, this was a light fruity tea that reminded me of some of the karel capek blends. I couldn’t really taste the tea, but that’s quite normal for flavoured teas and we enjoyed this quite a bit!

The sparkling tea set also comes with one pot of TWG, so I chose the only exclusive tea on their menu: Saicho tea. This was a pomegranate flavoured sencha, and it reminded me a lot of a sakura or cherry tea – the promegranate note really reminded me of that! The tea was quite well-balanced and I enjoyed it.

Food Review

With our expectations raised from the sparkling tea, which came first, we dug into the savouries. The charcoal brioche bun with crabmeat was probably my favourite because it tasted like a pizza (it’s also red, so I’m not sure why the menu says “charcoal” on it. The maki was decent but unexceptional, until you consider the fact that sushi normally doesn’t appear at afternoon teas. In this case, its inclusion in the savouries makes for a pleasant change.

The rest of the savouries, however, did not standout. The egg mayo sandwich roll was decently executed, with good bread-to-filling ratio but wouldn’t really impress if you’ve had a good egg mayo sandwich before. My smoked trout with nori and wasabi mayonnaise sandwich was completely missing the mayonnaise and tasted like smoked salmon on white bread. I like smoked salmon, but this was a sandwich I could have made at home.

And then, the sweets came! We were quite excited to get these since they look so pretty! From bottom to top, there were: scones (with chestnut spread, clotted cream, and strawberry jam), the cakes (cheesecake, chocolate cake, raspberry lychee cake, and sudachi tart), and then the sweets (macaron, matcha azuki tart, and mochi).

Overall, I really liked the sweets on the top plate. The earl grey macaron was delicious and the mochi was authentic. I also liked the sudachi tart, because the citrus flavours made for a nice change. The rest of the cakes (those on the middle plate), however, were rather unforgettable. I’m not sure if I can get over the fact that the chocolate cake was labelled as “moist chocolate cake” but was completely not moist. Or very chocolate-y either. It was actually more disappointing than the fact that I didn’t see any marbling on the marble cheesecake (that could be excused because we thought we saw some swirls hidden beneath the chocolate topping).

The scones were decent though! They were warm and tasted pretty nice. Plus clotted cream was offered which is always good. I found them a bit too crumbly for my liking, but overall I enjoyed them.

Overall Thoughts

I realise that my post sounds quite negative, but the food here was better than what I had at Anti:Dote’s Christmas Afternoon Tea*! I guess I either had forgotten a lot of details when I wrote that review or I was trying to be diplomatic or both but for this, I really had very high expectations and cannot hide my disappointment. Keyaki, the Japanese restaurant at Pan Pacific, has a great reputation (and is on my to-eat list) so I expected this themed tea to be really good. But the tea felt overpriced given that I paid $62++ for it.

I’m still interested in trying Keyaki one day, though! In the meantime, if you know any other good Japanese-themed afternoon teas, please let me know.

*In all fairness, everyone else who has been to anti:dote really seems to like it! Maybe their regular afternoon tea is better?