Royal T Maid Cafe

Amber mentioned that there was a special event going on at the Royal T Maid cafe coming up, and was thinking about going. Since I had never been to the famed "first Maid cafe in the US" dealio, I agreed to go (I guess you gotta embrace your girly side every so often, right?) She made reservations for us at at 3:30pm.

The place was abuzz with activity as we walked into the main restaurant space. The gallery had an impressive collection of a lot of cool Japanese artists, and a section of the gallery was set up for people who had arrived to the event in their finest maid/lolicon/gothic lolita outfits - a photographer would shoot some pictures of you in this cutesy environment they had set up. A lot of people were dressed up - it was nice to see that people had a gathering place to show off their hard work/frilly costumes. But enough about the space, we were there to have high tea....

Even though we had made reservations, we were told we still had to put our names on a list and wait...which we complied to, even though Wonder was pretty hungry. When I saw that another party got immediately seated when they pushed the fact that they had reservations, I had to step up and make a bit of a stink - we had been waiting for at least 40 minutes! A table cleared up after that, so we were finally seated, but it was not a good start to our high tea...

After glancing at the menu, we all decided upon the special high tea set of the day, which was the most expensive thing they had...ah, well, sometimes you have to splurge, right? We were given amazingly pretty cups to drink water out of (those awesome bodum cups - two layered, so drinks would stay really cold/really hot.) The team of three waitress "maids" were really working hard during this event (one of them in high heels, no less!) so we were trying our best to be understanding of their situation.

Our teas arrived first - I ordered some sort of white tea. Each tea came in its' own bodum tea infuser, which is very elegant in presentation. Since it was burning hot outside, I requested some ice and poured my tea over it to make iced tea...which was refreshing.
And then they finally brought out our high tea sets...I admit, they're very pretty...

They're even prettier when they're next to each other.


I always start high tea sets from the bottom, so my descriptions will go the same way...the bottom of the tier started with mini tea sandwiches, and when I say mini, I really mean MINI...from the left...egg salad, tuna salad and avocado, spicy tuna and avocado, and cucumber. I remember the spicy tuna being my favorite, mainly because it was a nice Japanese twist to the usual high tea sandwich. These tiny sandwiches were basically two bites each, tops, so they were pretty much gone in a second.


I then oddly went to the top tier, because quiche is always best eaten before dessert, and before it got cold. It was a mushroom cheese quiche, and to be honest, it kinda sucked. It wasn't very flavorful, the taste was very bland. The crust wasn't rich or flaky, it was just..eh. Probably the weakest thing on the tier, which was unfortunate because I love quiche. Well, briskly moving on to dessert...

From the front center, we have: a pistachio macaron, a black sesame layer cake, a fruit tart, and a chocolate cake. The macaron was okay, I've had better but I don't have them very often so it was a treat, the sesame layer cake was the surprise delight of the desserts - moist, tasty, loved the top layer of...jam? I dunno, but whatever it was, it was delicious. The fruit tart was decent, I always like fruit tarts for the fruit and less for the shell. The chocolate cake was too rich and sweet for my tastes, and I couldn't finish all of it.

All in all, the maid cafe was definitely playing up the ambience level of the tea experience and not really the food. The price was a little too steep for me to come back very often, but they nicely gave us each a gift bag, which contained a "free coffee or tea" coupon. I used it that day to get Owen an iced latte, which he really liked (I think it was made with organic beans), so maybe I'll come back for the coffee bar and not so much the food.

Royal T Maid Cafe
8910 Washington Blvd Culver City, CA 90232