July 2025
This tea room has been recommended to me many times over; I’m happy I finally went so you can stop telling me that I gotta go!
The Good, the bad, the ugly, and the yummy of afternoon tea, Brockville Ontario edition. We recently had afternoon tea for two guests at Cosie’s tea room in Brockville.
I don’t recall ever being to Brockville before in my life and I was surprised how cute their downtown is; it seems like a lovely place to visit with a population of only 22,000 folks. We were passing through just for Afternoon Tea at Cosie’s so let’s get to it!
Starting with the Good. The amount and quality of the food served here was Good. Let me tell you alllllllll about it. First we each chose a tea. I chose Heavenly Cream and my husband chose the herbal fruit tea. It came quickly and our food was served shortly thereafter. The owner, I assume the owner, explained all the food to us with her lovely British accent. We each received two triangles of cucumber and mint sandwiches, 2 triangles of egg salad with some green onion, and two triangles of ham and grainy mustard. Each variety equaled one half sandwich if that makes sense. There were also two coronation chicken salad bites in a vole-avente puff pastry for each of us and two sausage rolls per person. All of these items were very fresh and tasted good. I enjoyed the mint added to the cucumber sandwich, a great flavour combination in my books! The egg salad also tasted very good. To be picky, I would have liked the sausage roll to be served warm and it was cold. I also would have enjoyed a quality British cheddar cheese added to the ham sandwich. Finally, I think the coronation chicken salad needed some raisins or nuts or mango; this was really just chicken with curried mayo but it still tasted good; just not coronation-y, to me. Those are just my three personal preferences; these savouries were ample, fresh and overall tasty.
We each received one large scone served with strawberry jam and authentically made clotted cream. We each got our own generous portions…yay for that; I love NOT sharing! The difference between the jarred clotted cream that is imported from the UK and a house-made authentic preparation is often that there is a different texture from the solidified fat that you can taste when home-made is made correctly, and I could decipher that here. I asked the owner and she confirmed that it is made in-house and then heard another employee explaining the process to another table - definitely made in house using the proper method - you can see that method in the Clotted Cream play list on my TikTok account. Anyway, the scones were very large and fresh. They have a case of flavoured scones that they sell and serve to people who drop in for lunch or cream teas so I’m guessing that they make and sell a lot of scones here. I liked this scone and even though there was only 1 per guest, it was large and I even shared my second half with my husband to ensure I had space to eat my sweets! Zero complaints about the scone situation here; and that’s rare for me to say!
For sweets we each received 5 items. A biscoff truffle, a chocolate filled cream puff, a macaron, a lemon tart, and a strawberry meringue. All of these items were delicious (except the macaron of course b/c I don’t enjoy those cookie little nuggets). I would surmise that all of these sweets are made in-house. Perhaps by local bakeries but definitely small batch high quality items. There aint no grocery store desserts here and I’m here for it!
My two favoutite sweets, b/c I cannot choose just one, were the biscoff truffle - man it was delicious- and the strawberry meringue. This beauty was filled with clotted cream and whipped cream on top. Now I don’t know for sure that it was clotted cream inside the meringue but it wasn’t just whipped cream, it wasn’t cream cheese, it wasn’t mascarpone and had the extra mouth feel and neutral flavour of clotted cream so I am pretty sure that’s what was in there. Then it did have some whipped cream and strawberry coulis too; it was very well done and delicious!
In case you couldn’t tell I found the food here to be very good. Other than the few notes of my personal preferences on the savouries that I mentioned for improvements, I cannot fault this food at all; it was very well done.
The Bad - Nothing was bad about this afternoon tea, this venue, nor the service here but the price is being classified as the bad aspect. The price was $65 per person. I did not know, or remember, or care about the price until I went to pay for it, so it was kind of a sticker shock. $65 per person is about $20 to $25 more than the going rate for afternoon tea in Ontario outside of large hotels in major cities. Even at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Montreal, their afternoon tea was $2 LESS than this afternoon tea and yes, this venue is a nice tea room but hey, it’s not the Ritz Carlton here either. The food was good but I am not sure why they are charging big city prices in this small town - the only thing I can guess is that they don’t really want to serve too many of them so a high price tag would limit interest. Perhaps they want to focus on light lunches and cream teas instead. Anyway, the price is certainly too high here, in my Ontario expert opinion.
Moving onto The Ugly - Nothing here was ugly. Just look at these cute tea cosie’s on the tea pots. So a propros based on this tea room’s name.
For The Yummy - my favouite bites were the biscoff truffle, the strawberry meringue and the scone with the properly made clotted cream.
Based on my entire experience, food, tea, atmosphere and price - my Queen of Afternoon rating is 4.5 out of 5 stars. I did deduct that half point for the wack pricing. But an enjoyable afternoon tea splurge in Brockville. Have you been to Cosie’s for Afternoon Tea? Would you go and be okay paying this price for this offering in this venue? Share your impressions in the comments and thanks for watching tea friends!
