Quick review of BLUEBIRD in New York City – (read below for longer review and menu breakdown)
Booking Process ♦♦♦♦♦- online and very easy! It’s through their website and easy to navigate. All available times are listed and you can see everything that’s available different seatings are in different colours to try and make it as simple as possible. You can instantly confirm and change your time if you can’t make the original booking. I wish everyone had this system. Check it out here.
Ambience/Setting ♦♦♦◊◊ – It was good but not at all traditional. It’s a restaurant that overlooks central park which is a lovely view but it’s not set up traditionally tea wise at all. They have a DJ playing music you would generally expect in a bar of an evening so not exactly ideal for an afternoon tea where you’re wanting to chill. But it wasn’t unpleasant just different.
Service ♦♦♦◊◊ – were friendly and pleasant and keen to help but most were very new and were either on their first or second day so weren’t very knowledgeable but they tried hard.
Tea Selection ♦♦♦◊◊ – had a selection of 9 teas that included the standards and some new and interesting flavours. The teas were lovely and were steeped nicely the only downside is the pots that they poured from were terrible pourers and for would leave more outside the cup than inside it.
Sandwiches♦♦♦♦◊ -. Really delicious!! They were traditional sandwiches with their own slight twist on them but without going too crazy. Bread was soft and fresh and ingredients were flavourful.
Scones ♦♦◊◊◊ – I had high hopes for the scones here as they are an English restaurant in NYC but they didn’t quite managed to get me excited. They were in the traditional English way but overcooked and dry and cold by the time they got to us.
Cream ♦◊◊◊◊ – Clotted cream made in house made me so super excited but the cream still had the skin to make it more rustic in it’s appearance. Overall it was chunky and not in a good way which would totally have been fine if the taste was good but it was genuinely tasteless and didn’t add anything to the scone.
Desserts ♦♦♦♦◊ – Amazing presentation and very quirky I loved what they looked like. Each one was a little tribute to something in the UK with umbreallas and chimney stacks and of course a blue bird. They tasted pretty good too but were just too sweet for me to manage anything more than a bite of each.
Cost♦♦♦♦◊ – at a total of $59 each with all taxes and service charges included I was pretty satisfied. With a view like that and that it’s in New York I could have expected to pay more which I wouldn’t have been happy about so thought it was just about right for the experience.
Times – Everyday, seatings are every half an hour from 2pm until 430pm.
Overall the food was good and we were all full as we left. The ambience was a little strange with the DJ but the view was great to people watch while the weather was bitterly cold outside it was pleasant and enjoyable to be inside. A few things could have made it amazing but it was still an enjoyable afternoon.
– Review of BLUEBIRD in New York City –
I know it’s June now so it’s really warm but I actually have been really slow to get this post up and we went in January when it was FREEZING!! New York was stunning though and we had a great time there. It was, though, of great relief anytime we were inside and this was no exception. Bluebird was a lovely afternoon out of the cold wind.
Booking Process
I LOVED this part of the process. Like a true millennial (only just) I hate calling places on the phone and want to book online. I like to see what’s available and have a think about when will suit me with the thousands of plans that I’ve already made for the same day. This was a great system that was really easy to navigate I wish that all places had this system available. I was able to prepay for my experience at the time of booking and was sent all the confirmation via email. As we had some changes of plan the day before the booking I was able to change the booking to start 30mins later via the online booking process which was very convenient. Did I mention I loved this system? If you’d like to book just go to their website here.
Ambience/Setting
This was a strange one as it was like walking into a regular restaurant that was not designed to be open during the daytime. I guess I’ve been used to the traditional “stuffiness” that normally comes along with afternoon tea when you go to a hotel lounge. There was no fanfare of the traditional tea layout and you were seated at a table with regular white plates and regular cutlery, nothing fancy or indicative at all that it was an afternoon tea not dinner that you were sitting down to. To add to the strange middle-of-the-afternoon-but-really-a-dinner-restaurant vibe was a DJ that was playing music much louder than you would have expected in any place in the afternoon outside of a music festival. I am totally all for background music in fact I love it and I loved some of the music that the DJ played it just made it very difficult to have a conversation with the person next to you as it was LOUD. For me the best thing about Afternoon tea is the company that you go with and the chance to catch up. That was much more difficult here. Saying that though the view over central park IS amazing and very enjoyable to look out of so you can spend plenty of time not talking and just staring out the window at the view. We were lucky enough to get a table right next to the window so that kept us very well occupied for the times that we couldn’t hear each other talk.
Service
The service was pretty good and everyone was nice and professional both when we arrived and throughout the meal. When the food arrives in a couple of half bird cages the manager or senior member of the serving staff comes over and talks you through all the different courses. We had some questions but as it was the gentleman’s first day I won’t hold it against him that he couldn’t answer a single one. I’m not a big fan of having my conversation interrupted every two minutes to ask if I’m fine that seems to be very popular protocol with servers here in the US, I’d rather that I’m left to my own device to enjoy my meal and company and signal to them when I want something. That mostly worked here but then kind of didn’t when we couldn’t get their attention. The only thing that was particularly difficult was trying to get refills of hot water for our teas but on the whole I actually like the more hands off approach that we found here.
Special Note
When you sit down you are presented with an list of Do’s and Don’ts for tea etiquette. I enjoyed the idea and we all had a good debate about which on the list that we agreed with and which we didn’t. There was much debate as there always is about the first on the list being cream under the jam. I didn’t agree with everything on the list but it did make for a great start to a discussion.
Tea
The menu consists of 9 teas from Rishi-Tea and Botanical –
Earl Grey | English Breakfast | Hibiscus Berry | Jasmine Pearl | Peppermint | Ruby Oolong | Sencha | Tumeric Mango | White Peony
I thought it was a great mix of having a couple of traditional teas along with some more adventurous flavours without having so many flavours that you can’t make a decision. They also had a couple of fruit choices to appeal to the US clientele. It’s been my experience that the American’s at surrounding tables at all of the tea’s I’ve been to have been quick to order the very fruity options on any of the tea menus whereas those that I’ve gone with who have all fallen into the Aussie/British/Kiwi category have all gravitated towards the traditional black teas. Perhaps it’s one of many cultural differences or perhaps it’s just coincidence.
I had the English Breakfast as did my brother and my husband went for the Earl Grey. All were delicious and robustly flavoured they were perfectly steeped for when they arrived at the table however by the time you got to the second cup they were bitter from over steeping. So for our second pot there was a lot of mess produced from each of us trying to remove the basket infuser from inside our teapots so we could enjoy more than one cup from our pots. The other messy point was that the pots themselves were terrible pourers so just as much tea got over the table, the saucer and your lap as got into the cup. We all tried various techniques to keep from scalding ourselves but they could have done better with pots that poured properly.
Tea Sandwiches/Savories/First course
Yum Yum Yum! They were delicious. For somewhere that the rest of the place didn’t show a spec of traditionalism they were good at keeping to traditional menu for the sandwiches. They did add their own flair to the flavours and they worked and were delicious. The bread was fresh and soft and the flavours rich and complimentary. I’d happily eat these again!
Malabar chicken, apricot & apple | H. Formon & Son smoked salmon, lemon butter | Heirloom free range eggs, mustard cress & Truffle | Cucumber, cream cheese, dill & chives |
Scones
High expectations again….. not quite met. They were fine and edible but nothing to get really excited about. They were dry and overcooked which if you slathered it in jam and cream you could have gotten away with it except for the cream which I’ll talk about next. The bases of the scones were thick and hard and they were all cold by the time we got them. On the surface I think (and talk) about scones being a vessel for cream as I love cream, but in truth I love scones too and want them to be warm and slightly moist while still being fluffy. They aren’t rocket science to make so I’m always astounded at how easy it seems in the US to do it wrong. The jam was a delicious strawberry jam made in house and if you were looking just at presentation then the scones were great. I just would have loved them to taste as good as they looked.
Cream
Urgh no uh uh. So excited when I heard the speech at the beginning of the meal about it being clotted cream made in house, as my previous experiences in the US have been amazing with in house cream and average with purchased cream but this was very average. It had brown lumps all the way through which at first makes it look like it’s gone bad and makes the consistency anything but smooth. I asked the server just to make sure it wasn’t bad and make sure that was how it was supposed to be and was told it was just like that because it was made in here and they left the “skin” on the cream. I’ve made clotted cream at home before and know all about the skin but normally as you stir it into the cream it softens and mine wasn’t brown so I can only assume that we got a batch that was overdone. I make a lot of my own stuff from scratch and am totally one of the millennials that goes for rustic “honest” food so even with my doubts about the chunky brown bits I promise that I tried it with an enthusiastic attitude but it was incredibly flavourless and definitely not creamy if anything it was slightly slimy. Very disappointing as cream is definitely the highlight of afternoon tea for me.
Desserts
They were so cute! So much effort was made into this course and it shows. The sweets were all themed and made for an amazing looking plate. There was a nod to the old folklore of fairies, along with the chimney stacks that might have been danced on in Mary Poppins along with a macaroon in the shape of an umbrella for a country that is infamous for it’s rain. The cutest though was definitely the titular cream puff which looked up at you as you popped it in your mouth. Poor little Bluebird!
Fairyland Meringue | Chocolate Chimney | Jane’s Macaron | Well-Fed Bird Cream Puff | Cherry Medicine
They were all delicious although as they weren’t small I only managed a bite of each as any more than that was just too sweet for me. If you have a sweet tooth you’ll definitely love these.
Overall even though it wasn’t perfect we enjoyed our time at Bluebird. We could have done with better scones and definitely the music turned down a few notches but the other delicious courses made up for the scones and the view made up for the music. I wouldn’t necessarily go out of my way to go there again but I also wouldn’t actively avoid going again. It just definitely wouldn’t be somewhere I chose to take my mum or other older generation friends without ear plugs.
Thanks for reading! If you like it please subscribe to the blog and feel free to follow on instagram or any of the social media pages. If you want to ask me any questions please just comment below and I’ll reply as soon as I can.
