High tea has never been my cup of tea (so to speak) – all that sugar and scones, the tiered trays and twee tongs, the fact you “take” it, not eat it and that it’s natural home is somewhere prissy like the lobby of an expensive hotel (you could never order high tea in a dive bar or cafe with milk crates, for example). It’s the dining equivalent of using a posh telephone voice.
Yet it’s crazy popular – more so now than ever. Even a totally gross, quite scary salmonella outbreak linked to a high tea served at Melbourne’s the Langham, which sent 44 women to hospital, has not been enough to turn people off.
Despite the headlines such as “Toxic high tea” and “The high Tea from hell”, just a week after the outbreak the Herald Sun wrote that “every single table was packed with well-dressed Melburnians, groups of girlfriends and even a small baby shower for one heavily pregnant woman. The pretty stands, heaving with cakes and sandwiches, were being quickly devoured. Nothing, it seems, scares off us tough Victorians and our love of high tea.”
Yes, nothing gets in between tough Victorians and their scones …
Fancy Nance is an Adriano Zumbo place that serves high tea in a sort of bright, glycaemic, headache-inducing, Alice in Wonderland-inspired venue off Chapel Street in South Yarra, Melbourne.
Zumbo – for those who don’t watch TV – is a pastry chef made famous by the reality show MasterChef Australia. He’s known for his psychedelic-looking macarons and the queues that run down the street outside his bakeries in Balmain and beyond.
At Fancy Nance, we ordered two $65 serves of the “I’m so fancy” high tea. Unlike traditional high teas, the food isn’t presented all at once on a tiered tray (all the better to Instagram) but morsels arrived on tiny plates in the manner of a degustation.
So what did we have? Take a deep breath and unbuckle your belt …
- Linzer cake with vanilla chantilly
- Grapefruit with white chocolate ganache, olive oil and shizo
- Passionfruit curd, lemongrass panna cotta, lime tapioca and coconut espuma
- Chouxmaca with berries and cream
- A macaron
- Apple pie, cinnamon marshmallow and sorrel
- A scone with two jams
- pastries
- Puff pastry with candied olives and smoked ricotta
- Cured salmon, rye, fresh apple and creme fraiche
- Pork rillette on a pretzel bun
- Osso bucco with pea shoots
- Tea, coffee or hot chocolate
Fancy Nance is also licensed so you can wash it all down with some bubbly (which we did – the local sparkling seemed appropriate and was $10 a glass).
Later on I felt queasy – not in a salmonella way – but from all the sugar. I don’t have a sweet tooth so powering through what was essentially a 12-course dessert degustation left me feeling irritable and headachy – like a vegan toddler at a McDonald’s birthday party.
The next day my pants split when I got out of a cab and I had to wear a long jacket inside all day, even though it was hot. Whatever …
OK, the food … let’s say you LOVE sugar, you are not on a program to quit sugar and you have emergency pants. Should you book a table for high tea?
It’s a good – if somewhat novel – experience if you like your desserts slightly east-meets-west with inventive combinations that mostly work. Also it’s great if you like the colour pink – as the bathrooms and the restaurant walls are covered in lashings of a sickly sugary shade. It’s also worth noting that apart from my dining companion, MG, and the waiter, every single person in Fancy Nance was female, and the aesthetic experience of eating at Fancy Nance was like getting lost in Kmart’s Barbie aisle.
But back to the food … the portions are bite-size and beautifully presented with squirts and squiggles, moulds and towers on the plates.
The passionfruit curd, lemongrass panna cotta, lime tapioca and coconut espuma was delicious but “fails when you get to the tapioca bit – it tastes like gravel,” according to MG. But the whipped icing was like “delicious shaving cream – but without the soapy taste”.
Grapefruit with white chocolate ganache, olive oil and shizo was also intriguing. The tart taste of the grapefruit cuts through this dish nicely, although it reminded my pal of “when you miss breakfast at your hotel, and you’re really hungry so you eat the things on the stand at the airport chairman’s lounge. But you have too much and you feel sick.”
Yes, that.
The Linzer cake was “like a friendly teacake, full of jam”. Mine had a lovely honey cinnamon taste and, crucially, wasn’t too sweet. It was like circuit breaker amid the sugar rush, or the bit when you’re at a gig and the band plays a slow song and everyone sits down and rests.
Things stepped up a notch when we got to the chouxmaca with berries and cream. It was decadent and oozing out of its casing, with the black top layer seemingly pure sugar.
But while sugar seems to make up every particle of this dessert, Zumbo mixes up texture. It’s crunchy, creamy and sticky all at once.
The apple pie also played with texture. The crust was tough – but the right sort of tough. You could snap a front tooth on the hard biscuit base, but the stewed apples piled on top were deliciously soft. Teeny tiny marshmallows complemented the fruit. The apple “was a really warranted change, I need that tart fruit to counter the toxic shock of all that sugar,” MG said.
The salted caramel macaron, dark and velvety on a mound of minute chocolate balls, was like eating candied Coco Pops. Inside the shell is a crumbly chocolate filling with the texture of breakfast cereal.
Then came the only thing on the menu that really resembled proper high tea: scones. These were paired with a redcurrant jam and a capsicum jam – along with a dollop of chantilly cream.
The capsicum jam was a novelty. It was a bit cloying and strange-tasting, with a spicy aftertaste.
The pasties of the day included a sweet cinnamon scroll. “It’s like a babka – you know, the Ukrainian oily cakes.” Otherwise “it’s delicious, it’s fine,” said MG.
It’s at this juncture of the Fancy Nance experience that we started flag. Maybe it’s the crash after the sugar high, maybe it’s anxiety about what our dentists will say – but after the pastries we are craving bitter tea. A pot of Japanese green tea brings our palates back down to earth.
Then the savoury courses arrive. There’s an inversion going on here – which is quite weird – starting with sweet and ending with the savoury, which is essentially a large lozenge-shaped meat (osso bucco with pea shoots – that combines salty and sweet).
The candied olive puff pastry is AMAZING – delicious, smoky, inventive, “like smoking a pipe ... or chewing on a pencil by the fire”.
The cured salmon on rye was “messy but restorative – like bran with creme fraiche with tiny discs of fresh apple – like the suggestion of apple”,
Ultimately I don’t recommend that anyone eat a 12-course, mostly dessert meal. But if you are a Zumbo fan and have a sweet tooth, there’s probably no place you’d rather be.
• Fancy Nance, 14 Claremont Street, South Yarra. The Guardian pays its own way and reviews anonymously
