High Tea Report: Grand Hyatt Hotel Melbourne

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All my friends know what a high tea fiend I am. I will never turn down a high tea invitation...maybe it's the excuse to glam up and make full use of my overflowing designer wardrobe? Maybe it's the cute, bite-sized food on offer? I reckon it's both. And of course, I'm always on the lookout for high tea institutions which look after both meateaters and vegetarians well! My latest tea venture brought me and two girls to the Grand Hyatt because it was the only one which suited our schedules that day. It pains me to have to write a negative review, but unfortunately I wasn't too impressed by it. Read on to find out why...

Having settled ourselves into the plush lounge-style dining room - the interior design gets a big thumbs-up from me (see photo below) - we started off with a three-tiered stand of sandwiches and cakes. I'd forgotten to tell them about my dietary requirement when making the booking, but nonetheless there were enough egg sandwiches to keep me satisfied. Quality-wise, the sandwiches weren't overly impressive - no better than what I could have made at home. The cakes were pretty decent, but were of the kind of quality you'd expect from a plain jane suburban café, not a five-star hotel high tea.

(Photo credit: The Grand Hyatt Melbourne)

On weekdays the Hyatt high tea includes a small buffet, which we started "working on" once we were done with the tier stand of food. There was only one vegetarian option, a mini-wrap, which I found pretty crudely made. It wasn't well wrapped, which meant that it easily fell apart once I tried to eat it, and it too fell below my expectations, with a thick chunk of capsicum and some greens. What really ruined it for me though, was the random slosh of spicy, supermarket-quality, salsa-style sauce which just did not make sense with the ingredients and completely spiced out my taste buds. I ultimately resorted to taking a few bruschetta, removing the salami and just eating them with the veg-friendly ingredients. As for the sweets, they weren't much of an improvement either - most of them consisted of the same bad generic crust (refer to my photo) with various crème fillings. For example, my friends commented that the mandarin-white chocolate one was a "weird" flavour combination which did not work well together. There were also various other sweets on offer, for example cakes, ice cream and toppings, and chocolate fondue, but these were similarly of very plain quality.

At $35 a head, the weekday Grand Hyatt high tea is quite cheap by Melbourne high tea standards which is a plus, but in my humble opinion the quality of the food is reflected in that. It wasn't "unacceptably bad" as such, but it was very, very ordinary as you can tell from my descriptions above. Coming to a five-star hotel for high tea, I expected a certain quality of offering, which just wasn't what I got. To their credit, the dining area is really lovely as I mentioned before, and service was friendly. However, in the end it is the food which truly makes or breaks an institution and in my opinion, I would rather pay a little more to be rewarded with something of much better quality. Look out for my upcoming high tea reviews to see my recommendations!

Rating: C

Vegetarian Friendliness: 5/10
Price Range: $$$

 

The Collins Kitchen @ Grand Hyatt Melbourne

123 Collins St, Melbourne

VIC 3000

AUSTRALIA
 

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Instagram: @joicejlau