Been eyeing Emma Jane for a while.
Uniquely squeezed in the middle of the Montrose neighborhood.
When you first sit down, you do feel fancy with the tea setting. It does make you feel happy.
For holidays, they have pretty menus printed. But for the set it was $65, they automatically add the gratuity.
We'll worry about that later, but first, get's get some bubbly!
The tea set is super pretty and the set comes with 3 types of tea. So you can try their seasonal as well as other tea that strikes your fancy. We chose the Creamy Earl Grey, which is not something I get to try often. And the body texture is creamier than I'm used to. Honey and Fig, which is Oolong based; and the Winter Blend, which is rooibos based (aka caffeine free) has orange peel, cinnamon and vanill.
With your tea, it comes with honey, and of course clotted cream and apricot jam.
As usual, you have savory sandwiches, scones, and sweets on top.
The bottom tray has all the savories. I will rank the roast beef with onion jam as my favorite. The Golden Raisin Chicken salad, I can't really taste any chicken. The Cranberry tarragon was my least favorite, though I liked the cranberries.
For the scones selection, there's a Chive and Gruyere scone, the other is Peppermint Chocolate scone. I liked the Chive and Gruyere, it was more scone-like. The chocolate one is too rich, the texture is like a very thick cake donut. I also have to take issue with the clotted cream. We've have had clotted cream in a lot of places around town. We've had house-made ones, flown in from England ones, and these are the not very good ones. I'm not sure what went wrong there, it's neither creamy nor a hint of sweet which is typically the characteristics of clotted cream. That can also be that the chocolate is too sweet, and flavor accents are not showing up. But definitely cannot tell on the gruyere one, I used the honey instead.
For the sweet tray we have Pumpkin Bar, which is very smooth and tasted good. Then we have a spiced pear and apple tartlet. Both are good.
A tea is not complete without cucumber sandwich. This is cucumber with Boursin. I will say, this is my least least favorite and I do like Boursin. They basically have the Boursin pipped to the cute little circle sandwiches and put it in the fridge and so the Boursin is still not soft all the way. Which seems to be poor prepare on their part. Is not like they don't see our reservations ahead of time.
The last course is Chocolate Bread Pudding with Egg Nog Anglaise. This is also very rich, not bad. But by the time we gotten to here, we were 'breaded' up. I mean, look back, every single course has significant amount of bread, bread and more bread. I felt stuff yet super empty at the same time. Definitely have to go walk it off afterwards.
The other thing I take issue is the service. When you arrive, you see that the restaurant is split between two side. We were on the right side of the 'house', which seems to be main area for tea. There were 10 tables, max size is 6 people to a table, which they never reached that number. They were mainly 2, 3, 4 tops. With that said, they have kitchen staff make the food, obviously; 2 server at the bar that put together the tea set, 1.5 manager-person and 3 servers all help to make the tea. Given that many people, we can never get our server's attention to switch out the tea pots. As mentioned earlier, we have 3 pots of tea to go thru, and we were having a hard time to flag down our person, or any person to get our tea switched out. Now, the other side of the restaurant, I believe they serve tea as well as other food, because the kitchen is on our side we see food get sent out. But also seen them sitting for a bit before a server came to get it. So that strikes me as odd too. My thing is that if the 20% gratuity is already included, I also expects I get the service worth of that value.
Let's talk parking. So the maps apps sees the location as Clay Street, it takes you down the neighborhood. Now, I was lucky that someone across the street pulled out and I was able to easily coast in. But it is very tight with street parking on both sides, so travel carefully. That said, street parking all around are fair game, just be courteous to the neighbors. But there is a giant parking lot behind the restaurant, which they share with Katami, the new La Griglia, Pavon Coffee. The entrance of that lot is on the Dallas side, which is only valet. Typically, I'm told by the hostess, that they have valet for dinner time, but they didn't for tea that day. So that can be an option, but just keep in mind the street is a tight squeeze.
They serve tea Tues - Sunday from 11-5pm, in addition to their lunch service. Be sure to make reservation, the place is not big.
Emma Jane
1226 W. Clay St
Houston, TX
346-571-6961
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