I normally have afternoon tea with one of two sets of friends. This time, however, I decided to call everyone together and the four of us went for the Orchard Trail Afternoon Tea at Hilton Singapore’s Ginger.Lily lounge.

Service Review

I don’t normally talk about the service at afternoon tea because it’s not that important to me, but I was quite impressed with the pre-meal service here! They have a form to confirm that you are coming, with an option to add in allergies. I didn’t see my allergy (gingko nut) listed but wasn’t too worried because it’s not normally in afternoon teas. So imagine my surprise when the hotel called to check on my allergies, and then called back to let me know there were no gingko nuts. They even confirmed that at the start of the meal, so it’s nice to know they paid attention to the details.

Tea Review

Each guest at Ginger.lily gets two pots of tea, but because my friend and I opted to share our teas, I ended up trying 4! One of the reasons I chose to go to Ginger.lily was because they have some pretty original blends and I was not disappointed at the uniqueness of the blends. I’ll review them in the order I tried.

Kombucha: The opening drink was a kombucha made from their Ginger.lily blend tea. It’s pretty good – we can taste the tea and it’s not too fizzy or sour. In my opinion, anyway, I had a friend with a sore throat and she found the kombucha to be too sour for her. But as far as kombucha goes, I really like this one!

Sang Nila’s Lion C-Tea: This was described as a blend of black tea with florals and tropical fruits. Surprisingly, it smelled like a chocolate tea (very much like one of the Karel Capek chocolate teas). The teas have not only chocolate and fruity notes, but also a smoky note. It’s a bit unexpected and not quite like the description, in my opinion.

The Ginger.Lily: This green tea is their signature blend and has goji berries mixed with tea leaves and perfumed with florals and fruits. The goji berries were pretty distinct in this tea! I also got a slight herbal ginger taste alongside strong fruity notes. Overall this was a pretty delicious tea!

Singapore’s Glory: This is another green tea. The description said it was “handcrafted into a carnation” but sadly it is not a blooming tea. I thought this to be a floral and fruity green tea, but as the teabags are left in the pot, the floral notes do turn slightly bitter the longer the tea is steeped.

Halia & Poached Pear: This white tea is supposed to contain both orchard fresh pear and spicy ginger. Unfortunately, I did not get the pear notes here. I did get the ginger notes, and what felt like ginseng as well. This was perhaps, ironically, the least fruity tea that I tried.

Food Review

I’m not sure why but I took quite a lot of notes this time round, so I can give a really detailed review of the food as well!

Savouries

Ginger.lily provides both warm and cold savouries and all of them are pretty generous in terms of portion size. Unfortunately, while the savouries do try to have a twist, they are let down by the bread, which was generally a bit hard.

Of the warm savouries, the pork bun was basically a baked char siew bao. It tastes pretty nice, but there’s not a lot of filling and the Tim Ho Wan version is definitely better. The spinach cheese sandwich was my favourite of the three warm options, because of the copious amounts of cheese. As for the mini-burgers, the size of the patty was surprisingly big. But, the burger was a bit dry and honestly, I could do with less food because there’s still a lot more to eat!

My favourite of the cold savouries was the iberico ham crostini, because the bread was crispy and the ham was well-seasoned. The avocado toast kind of took on the flavours of the ikura eggs which was not to my taste (even though I like ikura) and the ratio of the bread to filling in the lobster roll was off.

Sweets

The first thing that arrived at our table was not the savouries, but the scones! I have to say that their spreads are some of the best I’ve tried – there’s the ginger lily blend which is unique, and a light clotted cream, but my favourite is their chocolate ganache spread. It’s so good and I was tempted to just eat it as is!

Now, I didn’t take that many notes for the sweets because it was so good I just couldn’t stop eating! I really enjoyed this portion of the meal, but let me just mention them all.

Perhaps to get my least favourites out of the way: The spiced apple tartin looks really pretty but the ratio of crust to filling was off. It’s also very spiced, befitting the lounge’s name, but I think some people may not like it. The Almond Fig Tart was decent, but I’m not a fan of figs so I wasn’t a huge fan. I did really like the pastry though, that was very good.

Moving up, I really liked the blue hibiscus bar! I didn’t really get the hibiscus (it felt more like butterfly pea flower) but it really melted in the mouth. The macaron part of the Pink Peppercorn Cherry Macaron was really good, but I still don’t understand the addition of peppercorn. My friend removed the peppercorn and placed it in her lobster roll (she says that helped) and I really wish I did that because the macaron was great otherwise!

My favourites of the lot were the Tutti Fruity Tea Cake and the Valrhona 46% Amatika Chocolate cake, The Tutti Fruity tea cake was so pretty and tasted great; the crumb of the cake was very fine and it was very moist as well. The Chocolate cake was my favourite incredibly moist and rich, but also quite light. I thoroughly enjoyed every bite of that.

Overall thoughts

I really enjoyed my time here! The presentation of the tea was beautiful, the service was great and most importantly, the tea and food were original and delicious. I do wish the savouries were better executed, but they are still better than some other teas that I’ve tried. The sweets pretty much pushed the tea to a whole new level – this is really one of my favourites now!