Tea Pairings & Food
The lunch crowd had gone. Dinner hadn’t arrived yet. I came in during that strange, in-between hour, a little after three on a weekday, when the escalators at Wheelock Place hum quietly and Orchard Road feels almost gentle. Most people were still at their desks. I wasn’t. I wanted tea, and I wanted to sit…
There’s a particular kind of afternoon that asks for tea, and All Things Delicious answers it with a quiet, comforting tea-and-cake experience on Arab Street: handmade sweet treats, warm approachable teas, and a room that makes simple pleasures feel like enough. Not coffee, with its urgency. Tea. The slow kind, poured while the conversation drifts…
I visited on a weekday afternoon, around three, when the city had quieted into that particular lull between lunch and the evening rush. I’d been curious about Pryce Tea for a while, mostly because the brand keeps surfacing among people who talk about teas the way some people talk about wine. With a reputation built…
I noticed the ginger lily flowers before I noticed anything else. Not real ones, exactly. A wall of them, suspended in resin, catching the light as I stepped off the lift on Level 5 at Hilton Singapore Orchard, home to Ginger Lily, a floral-themed afternoon tea lounge on Orchard Road. I stood there a second…
The bubble tea I queued for last month came with a caramelized brûlée top I had to crack with the back of my spoon. It was fine. Pretty, even. But somewhere between the torched sugar and the cheese foam and the third topping I didn’t ask for, I lost the drink itself. So I went…
I forgot, for a moment, that I was indoors at Hortus, the Mediterranean restaurant nestled within the Flower Dome at Gardens by the Bay. There were trees above me, real ones, and the air held that cool, green stillness you usually find early in the morning somewhere far from the city. A leaf drifted down…
I almost walked past it. Owen Road Singapore doesn’t announce much. A quiet stretch, low buildings, the kind of road you pass through on the way to somewhere louder. Then there it was, unassuming, just numbers on a wall: 117. Anteasocial is a contemporary Oriental specialty teahouse in Singapore, and if you’re looking for a…
I did not expect to find quiet at a McDonald’s Queensway Ridout Tea Garden outlet. But there I was, standing outside the McDonald’s outlet at 580 Queensway, listening to the water instead of the traffic. A much loved pond sat just beyond the glass, surrounded by stone lanterns and trees leaning over it. Somewhere behind…
I went looking for a building that no longer serves tea. The Clifford Pier still stands where it always has, at the edge of Marina Bay, its old timber trusses arching overhead like the ribs of something patient. But when I arrived, hoping to relive a Heritage Afternoon Tea I’d taken there years ago, I…
The first time I really tasted bubble tea, I mean actually tasted it, I was standing outside a shoppers mall in the rain, waiting for a friend who was late. I had ordered something on autopilot from one of the many bubble tea shops in Singapore. But that day, without distraction, I noticed the tea…