HIGHER TEA

The spoon I had in hand was no ordinary utensil.

It had a fancy vine pattern etched on the surface.  A spoon, of course, does not need to tickle your eye or tongue; it simply needs to spoon.  This is surplus design, perhaps a throwback to a time before modernism declared that excess was excessive. 

The spoon was on the table at the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel for high tea.  This was before the modernization, when I was still able to follow the lights reflected in the spoon up to the ornate carvings on the ceiling twenty feet above, a fantasy of planes and curls.  An ode to details from a time when details soothed. 

The columns that supported this ornamental sky were themselves elaborate confections.  Crafty hands made those florets and arabesques, drew them on paper, carved them in wood, molded and cast them in plaster, then gilded them.  Lost arts from a lost time.

Our table was draped in white linen, with velvet-backed chairs and a matching chaise that faced the rest of the Palm Court. A red-haired woman with a tortoiseshell comb that held her hair in a grand brioche surveyed the menu.  A man holding an ebony cane with a gold leaf knob watched me watching her.  Fern fronds tickled me as I realized that the name of the place could be spoonerized into Calm Port.  Perfect.

On a low central stage before tall, frosted doors, two ancient brothers performed a stately serenade on violin and piano.  Glasses clinked, silverware chimed, and chatter soft as a pillow seemed to hover.  This was, after all, not just any old tea or lowly tea or a quick teabag with lunch.  This was the tea of the rajahs, of princes in their palaces, of an afternoon in Ceylon watching the elephants graze.

Our waiter was a little fellow with thick black hair who spoke in an accent from the border somewhere between Romania and Zurich, if there ever was such a border.  When tea was served, he wiped the porcelain pots dramatically and placed them before us.  With a practiced twist of his wrist, he pointed the handles to each of us, then planted a serving tray in the midst...a three-tiered silver server with scalloped platters.  The lowest level contained our tea sandwiches, neat triangles of bread with watercress and cucumber, served without crust.  The middle level held apricot and raisin scones, small and thick.  Nearby, a ceramic pourer was filled with clotted cream butter.  On the highest level, there were eight perfectly designed pastries...petit fours and Napoleons and little fruit tarts sculpted for munchkins. 

Design is never just for the eye.

High tea at the Palm Court was froufrou as civility, ornament as elegance.  Form following filigree, not function.  There one learns to take high tea not drink it, to have the food not wolf it, and to gaze not gawk.  And to try not to feel bad for the army of primpers and polishers standing the wings so that one could feel princely of an afternoon tea.

You cannot go through the made world and think of the inequities in it because they are rampant and will never let you go.  Sometimes it is best to appreciate things for just what they are, if only for a moment.  To enjoy a detail of the eye or tongue, ear or touch.  Life after all is lived in those details and there is plenty of time left over for indignation of all sorts.  Plenty of time to ignore the ornaments.

But only a few precious ones to indulge in them.

I think of this whenever I make a cup of tea and dip a spoon in it.  I think about how design – of a spoon, of a room, of a pastry – can sometimes offer a taste of a world the way we wish it was rather than simply what is.