High Tea – Park Hyatt – harbourkitchen&bar

High Tea at Park Hyatt harbourkitchen&bar

How can you not love High Tea? It’s a great excuse to dress in fancy clothes and eat cake. My friend, who works at the Park Hyatt in the Rocks in Sydney has been raving to me about the pastry chef at the hotel’s restaurant, harbourkitchen&bar, Fabien Berteau. After learning that Berteau had come to the Sydney Hyatt after working at the venerable Park Hyatt Paris-Vendôme – it’s safe to say that my expectations and curiosity were high (to say nothing of the fact that he is reportedly quite easy on the eye!)

So when it came time for my mum’s birthday this year, I knew just the thing to treat her to.

The View

harbourkitchen&bar

You can’t beat the view at harbourkitchen&bar. After walking through the beautiful Hyatt foyer, we reached the restaurant door, where a friendly waiter greeted us with a smile and a promise to try and find us a table by the window. Yess!! The restaurant’s large glass windows open up onto the boardwalk outside the Park Hyatt hotel, just on Campbell’s Cove. There’s a gazillion dollar water view, and best of all – look what was just outside our window:

The view from our table! Ahhhhh!

High Tea at Park Hyatt is $36, which brings it more or less in line with the other establishments in Sydney that offer High Tea. This impressed me, as I was expecting to pay a premium due to the awesome location! For an extra $13, you can upgrade to a Champagne High Tea, with a glass of Nicholas Feuillatte “Reserve Particuliere”.

The menu at harbourkitchen&bar

With the High Tea comes a pretty decent choice of 17 different types of tea (including Herbal), or coffee if you want to be unconventional. I chose Irish Breakfast, for a bit of a pick me up.

Irish Breakfast Tea

 

The Food

The High Tea tower

Not long after we were brought our teapots, our High Tea tower arrived. Gasp! A thing of beauty, the silver tower held three plates – sweets, savoury, sweet.

 

Sweets

Strawberry milk macaron, profiterole, pineapple tart

Chocolate Profiterole cut in half, Pineapple tart and birthday message

Because the staff knew it was my mum’s birthday when I booked, they’d added a little chocolate Happy Birthday message onto the top layer of our tower, a (literally) sweet and thoughtful gesture.

The pineapple tart was filled with tiny pieces of fresh pineapple, sitting on a layer of lemon curd. Yum!

 

Savoury

Savouries – Proscuitto sandwich with Tomato and Pesto, Smoked Salmon and Watercress sandwiches

Biscotti with Roast Capsicum and Goats Cheese

Lucky the sandwiches were there to balance out the sweetness! The bread was light, fluffy, and still moist. And the biscotti was crunchy, with the sweetness of the roast capsicum on top of goats cheese.

 

Scones

But of course you can’t have High Tea without scones!

Scones with whipped cream and jam

They were still warm! In their cute little wrap. Like the rest of the tasty bites I’d sampled from the rest of the tower, the scones were very light (and very delicious). According to this article from Australian Traveller

The sugar-encrusted scones are the product of late night Wikipedia research and countless kitchen experiments with the very French chef initially unaware of the very English high tea staple. Needless to say, the brioche/scone creation is as distinct as the eclairs and Nicolas Feuillatte champagne that greets you upon arrival.

Whatever they were… briones? scoches? They were delicious.

 

Sweets

Dark Chocolate Truffle, Lamington, Cupcake

Wow! The last plate at last. The lamington was gorgeous – long and thin, meaning more surface area for chocolate coating!! Which I think is win. And the cupcake was great too – light and lemony. But by this time I could absolutely not handle the dark chocolate truffle – completely maxed out!! My mum however, said it was delicious.

Through the whole meal, I was so impressed with how light and fresh everything was – from the fresh chopped pineapple in the tart, to the freshly piped whipped cream, and the fluffy scones. And best of all, even though every tower served in the restaurant that day was obviously the same, each morsel felt like it was individually crafted and placed with care, never feeling like just one piece out of an assembly line of desserts. Which is special.

Strawberry Milk Macarons

harbourkitchen&bar
7 Hickson Rd
The Rocks
NSW 2000

Ph: (02) 9256 1661
High Tea at the Park is offered daily from 2.30pm to 4.30pm

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