The seated tea service at the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden is somewhat deceptively named. At least, that’s what you may think if you’ve never had it before. Going to the DeGolyer Tea Room won’t just give you a chance to sip on a cup of tea with your pinkie raised high.
Photography by Lauren Allen
Photography by Lauren Allen
Photography by Lauren Allen
Photography by Lauren Allen
This service is not available year-round but instead offered at strategic times throughout the year — Garden Tea ($64 per person) from mid-spring to early fall, Children’s Tea ($44 for ages 2-10, $64 for adults) during the summer, Harvest Tea ($67 per person) in autumn and Holiday Tea ($72 for indoor seating, $67 for the patio) during the weeks surrounding Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. Pricing includes admission to the Arboretum and parking.
The three-course menu for each season of tea is curated accordingly. Soup is served first, and it makes sense that alphabet chicken soup is on the children’s menu while chestnut soup is on the holiday menu. An assortment of sandwiches filled with chicken salad, cucumbers, turkey and the like are served for the second course. The third course is reserved for sweets — pecan clusters, bundtinis and truffles.
Scones are served as well. There’s the tea that changes with each course and matches the season it is being served in. Citrus and mango flavors for Garden Tea. Apple spice and peach ginger for Harvest Tea. White Champagne tea and cranberry apple hibiscus for the holidays and “Yummy Tummy Tea” for the children.
Younger children received their own menu when they gained access to the DeGolyer Tea Room in the pre-COVID-19 years. Tea service used to only be available to patrons 12 years and older, but people would request children be allowed in, particularly girls with their mothers or grandmothers and Girl Scouts wanting to learn etiquette.
“A couple of years ago, we decided to sit down with the caterer (Gil’s Elegant Catering) and say, ‘What can we do to offer tea that’s for kids under 10, 12 years old that’s appealing to them,’ because they don’t want an egg salad sandwich,” says Angela Rollins, the Arboretum’s special events director. “How can we still have that same experience but more to their taste buds but then having moms and grandmothers, aunts and everybody can come with them, too?”
The tea room organizers started offering a few weekends of Children’s Tea, and it always sold out. Even today as the Children’s Tea is on a set schedule, people call in the spring asking when it will start, Rollins says.
The Children’s Tea is a microcosm for the rest of the seasonal services.
“You can actually come to tea throughout the entire year and still have a completely different experience every single time you come, because the menus are totally different,” Rollins says.
In the tea room’s early days, the menu stuck to tradition — i.e., cucumber sandwiches and scones. Those items are still available, but the cucumber sandwich, for example, is recast with smoked salmon and dilled cucumber in the Garden Tea menu.
“We kind of try and keep the same traditions, the classic flavors, but then adding it to where it’s seasonal-based and just a little bit more updated,” Rollins says.
The DeGolyer Tea Room opened in the early 2000s as part of the restaurant of the same name. It’s located inside the historic DeGolyer House, a 1939 Spanish Colonial Revival-style home that belonged to oilman and geophysicist Everette DeGolyer and his wife, Nell Goodrich DeGolyer. The tea room today seats 40 people at most and was once used as a family gathering space, Rollins says.
“We kind of renovated it and made it the tea room to still have that same atmosphere of just a great gathering place,” she says. “The tea is more of an experience. It’s an actual hour-and-a-half process of having the three-course seated tea, so it kind of gives people that nice, elevated experience of coming in and enjoying tea and actually having time to sit and just gather with the family.”
The space that is now outfitted with blue and metallic-accented teacups, white table cloths and greenery used to be filled with knick-knacks as the Arboretum’s former gift shop, Rollins says.
Like the gardens themselves, the tea service is meant to grow and evolve. Menus are updated annually, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll receive the same teas, sandwiches and sweets at the DeGolyer Tea Room next year. Again, the varied experience is paramount.
“Years and years ago, we weren’t really changing the menu a lot,” Rollins says. “That’s kind of when we started to say, ‘Hey, people are getting bored. We need to do something new. We need to adjust.’”
