The Ritz

The Ritz doesn’t need to try particularly hard to justify its reputation, and that’s exactly the problem with reviewing it honestly: it’s very easy to be dazzled by gilt ceilings and a live pianist into overlooking whether the sandwiches are actually good. They are, as it happens, but the room does a considerable amount of the work here, and it’s worth being clear-eyed about which part of the £95 you’re paying for.

The Room

The Palm Court is the single most photographed afternoon-tea room in London for a reason: marble columns, a domed and gilded ceiling, panelled mirrors, and potted palms arranged with the kind of formal precision that makes every table feel like it’s on a small stage.

A pianist plays through service, which sounds like it should be twee and somehow isn’t — it settles the room rather than performing at it. The five daily sittings (11:30 through to 19:30) each run a strict two-hour slot, and the room is at its most genuinely beautiful at the later sittings, when the light through the tall windows turns gold rather than white.

Taking tea here on a first visit to London’s afternoon-tea scene is, for that reason alone, worth prioritising over a quieter room.

What to Order

There isn’t really an à la carte decision to make — afternoon tea here is the single fixed menu, and the choice that matters is which of the loose-leaf teas you pair it with (a proper list, not an afterthought).

The three-tier stand runs finger sandwiches — cucumber, coronation chicken, smoked salmon among the standard rotation — into warm plain and fruit scones with clotted cream and strawberry preserve, then a run of pâtisserie that changes seasonally and is where the kitchen’s actual technical range shows. The scones are the genuine standout: warm, properly risen, and clearly baked in small batches rather than held under a lamp.

The Drinks List

The tea list is deep and taken seriously — this is a room that still treats the tea itself as the point, not just the stand around it. A Champagne supplement is available for anyone who wants to turn the sitting into more of an occasion, and the wine and Champagne list beyond that is exactly what you’d expect of a hotel at this level: comprehensive, correctly served, and priced accordingly.

What You Will Pay

£95 per person for the classic tea, before any Champagne supplement, plus a discretionary service charge — this is the top of the London afternoon-tea market and prices itself accordingly, with no version of the experience here that comes in meaningfully cheaper. It is worth every penny exactly once, as an occasion rather than a habit, and considerably less worth it if you’re not going to actually engage with the room and the ritual around it.

The Verdict

Book the day the booking window opens, wear the jacket and tie the dress code actually requires (men specifically — this is enforced, not a suggestion), and go in accepting that a meaningful share of what you’re paying for is the room and the occasion rather than the food alone.

Judged purely as sandwiches-and-scones, it’s very good but not obviously better than several rooms at half the price; judged as the single most complete grand-hotel afternoon-tea experience in London, that gilded ceiling and live piano earn their keep. First-time visitors to London’s afternoon-tea scene should start here, if only to have a fixed point of comparison for everywhere else.

The 4.5-star rating this review settles on holds back the last half-star for price alone, not for anything the room or the kitchen gets wrong.

What’s Being Said

The Ritz has had well over a century to get precisely one thing right, and it shows in the parts that can’t be faked with better ingredients: the timing of service, the way staff read a table without hovering, the sense that nobody in the room is rushing anyone through their two hours.

Newer rooms with more inventive pastry work can out-cook the Palm Court on any individual component. None of them have yet out-atmosphered it. The five-sitting structure is also a genuinely practical piece of design most competitors don’t bother matching — a 19:30 slot turns the whole thing into an early-evening occasion rather than strictly an afternoon one, which widens who can actually build a visit around it.

Piccadilly itself makes the room easy to fold into a day already built around St James’s or the surrounding West End, rather than requiring a special trip on its own.