As one of the events for my birthday celebration, the bf took me to Adorabelle Tea Room. Isn’t the name so lovely and ADORABLE? 😀 Prior to going I was very excited as I read some wonderful reviews of the place and the place looked so cute from the pictures that people took.
Adorabelle is a cozy little Old Courthouse located in Steveston Village. They offer afternoon tea service four times a day from Wednesday to Sunday. The place only has about five tables and is reservations only. They have specific seating times and limited to a one-hour seating time, which makes sense given how small the place is.
Their afternoon tea service is $25 per person. It comes with an assortment of tea sandwiches, two scones with clotted cream and jam, assortment of sweets, and your own pot of tea that you choose from their selection of teas. Pretty standard for afternoon tea in Vancouver, if not erring on the more affordable side. Even though the reviews for it were wonderful, I didn’t have too much expectations for the food quality going in. Partly because of the price and because I didn’t want to go in with too high expectations and get disappointed afterwards. ^^;
As you may know, Urban Tea Merchant is my favorite high tea place in Vancouver and I’m quite partial towards them. But I think I might have found another favorite with Adorabelle.
While food-wise, I would say Urban Tea is still more delicious, Adorabelle is definitely better in terms of pricing and decor/ambience.
We chose a horrible day to go down to Steveston village. There was a heavy rainfall/storm alert that day and Steveston village, being near the water, certainly didn’t help. Nevertheless, we braved the wind and rain and arrived at Adorabelle ten minutes before our 12:30PM reservation.
There is a paid parking lot right beside the tea room, but there is also free street parking in the neighbourhood.
We were seated right away and given some time to choose our teas. The tea room was divided with heavy curtains into two rooms with two tables in one room and three tables on the other room. The ceiling on our room was decorated with lit up blue skies, and the other room had the Eiffel tower.
The server came by promptly with the tea tray that held their selection of teas to see if we had any questions and if we were ready to pick our teas.
They will prepare the tea into the teapots at the table once you have decided. The food came pretty much right away and the server gave us a little explanation for everything on the tier. Throughout our stay, they were very attentive and would ask us how we were doing and refill our pots with hot water frequently.
The food was great! I loved all their tea sandwiches, especially the egg salad pinwheel (the bread was so soft and “fuwa fuwa”) and their savory cupcake (I just remember it had bacon in it and perhaps chives?).
Scones are always one of my favorite parts of afternoon teas. I really liked how they had two different types of scones for each person instead of just one small one or one huge one (like they had at The Fish House in Stanley Park). My memory is terrible but I remember one was honey glaze and the other had some kind of fruit… raisin? They served the scones with cream and strawberry compote.
Their scones were good, but I still like Urban Tea’s scones and their tea-infused jelly with clotted cream better. Adorabelle’s cream and strawberry compote was good but nothing to write home about.
For the sweets, I must say my favorite was the cream-cheese filled strawberry and their chocolate ganache. Their earl grey shortbread cookie was very good too.
All in all, I had a wonderful time. For that price and that quality of food and service, I will definitely be coming back again. Very often.
Can’t wait to go back again! XD
For more food photos, visit my Flickr~
