Loopy Lorna's, Edinburgh - Restaurants in Edinburgh | s1play.com

You'll have had your tea then?

Review published on 30/03/2009 © Sunday Herald

The saying “There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea” is attributed to an obscure French philosopher by the name of Heroux but I wish I’d thought that one up because it sums up my sentiments entirely.

Tea drinking, by which I mean the civilised consumption of fine, loose-leaf teas and all the traditional ceremony that surrounds it, is a wonderfully uplifting experience. Forget all those corporate cardboard buckets of coffee-flavoured milk designed to be gulped down on the hoof, they can’t compete with the ambling etiquette of a proper afternoon tea.

The clink of bone china, the glint of the tea strainer, the amber sparkle of high-grown Darjeeling, the contented background hum of people spreading ruby red jam and crusty cream on warm scones with well-worn steel butter knives engraved with “Made in Sheffield” … you can’t beat it.

There’s a club of afternoon tea aficionados like me, the sort who can’t go to York without taking tea at the venerable Betty’s. Oh how we love those black and white waitress outfits, the architecture of the tiered cake stand, the familiar crumble of the previous occupant’s biscuits on the velour banquette. It’s all so antiquated and yet it’s becoming surprisingly contemporary.

Belatedly, the “nation of tea drinkers” for which read “lorry driver’s swill drinkers” is deserting the lazy, dyspeptic, tannic tea bag for the finer art of tea appreciation and all its glorious heritage. Witness the transformation wrought in Edinburgh’s genteel Morningside where a last-century coffee shop has been reborn as Loopy Lorna’s, a 21st-century tea house run by the Starbucks generation.

The recession has been put on hold at Loopy Lorna’s, which has gone down a storm since it opened last summer. It is not at all cheap – quality teas and conscientious home baking never can be – but this exhilaratingly girly establishment is nevertheless packing them in.

People of all ages and both genders love the crockery, the old bone china that your granny threw out, the Doris day pinnies, the quaintly wacky tea cosies knitted by somebody’s granny, the prompt top-ups of hot water, the sugar cubes, and the lacy doilies wedged between the table and its practical glass surface. It’s as comforting as flannelette pyjamas and a hot water bottle.

There are reasonable soup-and-salad lunches and rather good breakfasts to be had at Loopy Lorna’s, things like home-made muesli or the Full Loopy Breakfast: Ramsay of Carluke’s free-range bacon and pork sausage, Stornoway black pudding, field mushrooms, grilled vine tomato with thyme, potato scone, baked beans and egg as you like it, all served with tea and toast, for £8.95. That’s rather more affordable than the full afternoon tea which will knock you back £12.50 or even £14.50, if you go for one of the rarer, more special teas.

For this you get a daunting amount to eat; finger sandwiches with smoked salmon and egg and cress, effectively a whole Cornish cream tea of crusty, fresh scones with clotted cream and jam, lurid cupcakes à la Manhattan’s Magnolia Bakery, buttery empire biscuits, mini-pavlovas and squares of Loopy Lorna’s uncompromisingly olde worlde tray bakes.

The selection is delightfully square. Seek not the weekend supplement sophistication of River Café lemon polenta cake or Elizabeth David’s classic chocolate almond cake. Think instead of a Brownie bring-and-buy sale, that nostalgic landscape of tiffin, buttercream sponge and coconut macaroons, basically everything that involves heaps of sugar, crushed digestives, condensed milk, and even the odd slab of margarine.

I’m addicted to the specially blended Earl Grey which is lightly fragrant with tiny bits of orange zest, loving the cream teas, challenged by the cloying margarine and icing sugar sweetness of the cupcakes (a few more grown-up offerings wouldn’t go amiss), disappointed by the ordinariness of the bread and still working my way through the tray bakes.

Loopy Lorna’s take on caramel shortbread has to be experienced (cocoa shortbread base, buttery caramel and milky white topping). I vowed I’d never eat a whole square of that sticky coconut, biscuit, caramel and two-types-of-chocolate thing. Of course I did, but then it kept me revved up all day. Fun, fun, fun.