Afternoon Tea at the Oriental Lounge, Mandarin Oriental Tokyo (Picture heavy!)

The afternoon tea session at the Peak Lounge, Park Hyatt Tokyo, ensured that we'll keep doing this tea thing for a long time. In October, our Afternoon Tea Club (me, hubby, his colleagues, whomever visiting or wants to join...) got together again, this time at the Oriental Lounge on the 38th floor of Mandarin Oriental Hotel Tokyo, in Nihonbashi near Tokyo Station. In fact, if you go I would recommend that you get a window seat and enjoy the sky view and the view of Tokyo Station with your tea ^.^

Here's the hotel lobby with entrances to the various restaurants and lounges. Photos were taken in the late afternoon as well as after sunset.

Looking at the Oriental Lounge, with the umbrella lamp shades at top right.


This is where the stairs lead to, and looking over the glass handrail, you'll see another bar/lounge on the floor beneath.

Among ourselves, all of us agreed that this afternoon tea session at the Mandarin Oriental Tokyo was hands down the best we've ever experienced. The atmosphere was so comfortable and relaxing, time just seemed to stop for all of us. The service was extraordinary attentive, even with all 7 of us (2 not pictured, myself and D. were too busy taking photos of the spread)! The moment one of our tea cups was empty, someone would already be around with the tea menu. Even the food itself showed extraordinary effort, each item was unique and ornate, and delicious!

I admit the tea menu (left) was rather limited with only about 15 selections, BUT trust me, the food, service, and atmosphere more than made up for the small tea menu. The afternoon tea menu (right) was all in Japanese, which was fine because some of us can read it perfectly well and translated for the rest. Turned out that tea session was caviar-themed and done in conjunction with the luxury cosmetic brand La Prarie. As you will see below, there were lots of "little balls" reminiscent of caviar.

The single versus double portion platter.

You're probably wondering where the scones were as they were absent from the 3-tier platter. That's the neat thing about afternoon tea at the Mandarin Oriental: you get 2 plates of sweets on the 3-tier platter, and the scones come on a separate plate! Also, our waiter told us that we could keep ordering more scones if we wanted. I don't know if that meant the scones are unlimited, but we didn't order more, having been totally stuffed and satisfied with ours.

Close up of savories.

Close up of sweets. As you can see, the "caviar" even made appearance on the the sweets. They weren't real caviar but were sweet jelly, of course!

The "caviar" in this mango mousse had slid to the side as I picked it up to photograph ^.^

After the tea session, we had such a great time we stayed for cocktail hour too!

And the highlight of the evening? The bathroom! xD Because it's actually not the bathroom itself but rather the view. For the ladies' room, our sinks has a lovely view. But what you don't know is that the men has it much better in what could only be an ironic statement to how the current world operates: in the men's room, it's actually the urinals that has this exact view. Why, so the guys can piss on the world, of course! 

Imagine relieving yourself to this.