Afternoon Tea at Piacere, Shangri-La Hotel Tokyo

In my last post on afternoon tea at the Shangri-La Hotel Tokyo, I mentioned hubby and I would bring our friends back for the monthly tea club. We did, and the most frustrating, funny-not funny thing happened: they switched restaurants on us!

I'd called and made a reservation for afternoon tea at the Lobby Lounge, but when we showed up, we were led away from the Lobby Lounge and deeper into the back of the hotel. To our surprised, they sat us at a table in the Piacere, an Italian restaurant in the hotel, which also offers an afternoon tea service. We were all pretty confused.

Looking back now, I should have insisted to go back to the Lobby Lounge, but at the time no one wanted a confrontation so we sat where we were seated. We figured it's the same hotel so it can't be that bad. Well, we were wrong. Sadly, our experience here leveled that of the Conrad Hotel Tokyo, sorely lacking in both food quality and service.

Right after we were seated, the manager of the restaurant came over to chat, and proceeded to make jabbing remarks at the Lobby Lounge and how "his" afternoon tea service was better. Right away, that should have been a red flag but we all were in a good mood and chalked it off to "bad jokes." Turned out our first instinct was correct--they all pulled a disappearing act on us. Once we placed our order, it was incredibly difficult to grab a hold of anyone to ask for anything else really, not even water.

This afternoon service is modern, so don't expect the 3-tiered silver tray. The menu looked fantastic, but I think they tried too hard. Instead of having a melody of tastes, many of the savories tasted jarring and their ingredients just clashed in my mouth.

At least the presentation was interesting, right? I'd prefer the trays to be smaller because we literally couldn't see each others' faces, being hidden behind the pyramid food trays.

Among the savories, the only thing I thought was okay was the quiche (bottom). The craziest thing is that I normally love prosciutto, but I didn't like the prosciutto-wrapped cracker with spinach at all!

The sweets were much better, and I liked most of it with the exception of the custard and strawberry pastry--they put slices of tomatoes in it, which totally threw the whole thing off for me.

Afterwards, among ourselves we agreed to give the Lobby Lounge one more try and make damn sure they won't mess up again. But we definitely won't go back to Piacere.