Neverland Tea Salon Vancouver — Restaurant in Vancouver

I am very disappointed. It was so loud and overly crowded. I have been recommended this place so many times, but the photos online are so different than in person, and the experience wasn’t good. There are several things that went wrong that I believe everyone should be aware of before they go! (Especially people who want to be Covid safe)

Went here for my bridal shower. A very very important day in my life. Never once congratulated me, or said anything regarding it, even though my mom said in the open table reservation that it was. We were 15 min late because unfortunately my dress broke, but gave them a call way ahead of time. They said our time would just be cut short which was fine. My mom booked the high tea, I wasn’t aware that high tea was 1.5 hours. But we figured we would have enough time. They also raised their prices so instead of $38, it’s now $45.

Anyway, I’m going to start from the moment I walk in, to the moment I left. As soon as we walked it, it was INCREDIBLY loud. I mean, I love going to pubs, so for example, it felt like I just entered a pub at 11pm on a Friday night. We sat down, and we couldn’t hear a single thing the waitress was saying to us. If we didn’t fear our credit card would be charged, we would have walked out. We were sat in the middle of everyone. I thought for such a special occasion, we would have gotten a better table. They were out of the 3 teas I originally wanted, but I ended up finding one they had. The tables were all SO CLOSE together! You could barely stand up to use the washroom before hitting someone’s chairs. With Covid cases still around, being that it’s so crowded, I felt very unsafe. If there was less tables, it would also be more enjoyable and quiet/calm like high tea should be. There’s also no flowers or decorations really anywhere. Everything was quite plain. Food was good, but not worth the $45. The kitchen was incredibly loud, they were serving us water in Avalon milk jugs and it had a weird colour to the water. So to me that wasn’t very classy, and all of the waitresses looked like they didn’t want to be there. I felt like we didn’t even have the last 20 minutes to enjoy ourselves. 15 min before our time was up, they started taking our plates and stands away. A random waitress that wasn’t ours, snuck up behind my friend and quickly grabbed the 3 tier stand that was right in front of her, and almost hit her. It scared her, because the waitress never said “oh let me grab this” or anything. She just ran over and started grabbing our stuff. Mind you, this was 15 min before we are supposed to leave. The waitress reminded us a couple times that we had 30 min left, then that we have 20 min left. I FELT SO RUSHED! When the waitress brought the bill, she never asked if we wanted it split or anything. They were quickly trying to wipe down everyone’s table before people’s reservations at 3:30. Instead, they should have 15 minutes between reservations to clean. Because the way they were cleaning, there’s no way they cleaned all surfaces. I work in service, so I understand what it’s like when it’s busy, but this wasn’t the case.

I have been to several high tea places and this was the worst experience I’ve ever had. Thank god the food was pretty good, otherwise i wouldn’t want to pay. I felt like they just wanted to take my money and shove me out the door. I’ve had way better experiences at the Honey Bee centre, White House, and especially at...

I have to be honest, I was beyond disappointed with my experience here. My friend made a booking for my birthday and although our main server was pleasant enough, there was another one who was shockingly rude, impatient and clearly didn’t want to be there. The brunette with the long dark hair was grumpy and begrudgingly dumped our tray off without a smile and with a lot of attitude. She was impatient with basic questions , both of us were polite so there was no reason to have such a strange attitude towards us. When we asked for a spoon since the weird little honey pot that they had was entirely inadequate to actually add honey to your tea she —no exaggeration—came back and literally tossed a large spoon on our table. We didn’t even have our tea trays explained to us. I’m not used to this kind of service at an afternoon tea seating.

The food wasn’t good either, it’s cute looking (likely for Instagram) but the flavours and ingredients were nothing I’d bother having again —very overpriced for what felt like small portions of grocery store deli food.

I couldn’t eat half the sweets, the scone and devon cream was also disappointing . Overall the afternoon tea was incredibly imbalanced, there was way too many high-sugar bland sweets (as mentioned, most of which were kind of inedible) and not enough savory offerings.

Further disappointing was that the tea itself was very poor quality and most weren’t brewed correctly. (I used to work in the tea industry). We tried 6 flavours and sadly all if them were either weak, cold or unpalatable. One reminded me if cold seaweed broth. Different types of teas call for different brewing times/temps of which this salon clearly doesn’t care—the absolute irony. Overall, both the flavours ,and the tea selection were unremarkable.

I also didn’t enjoy the scheduled seating approach. That say you have 90 minutes but rush you out much earlier than that to set up for the next seating. (Easily corrected for with some staggered seating times). You get reminded that you’re going to leave repeatedly starting 30 minutes in advance, and 10 minutes later they try to take everything off your table and hustle you to pay at least 15 minutes before the 90 minutes are up.

The music was also disruptive to the ambience (strange kind of John Mayer-esque pop music)

All in all, with the aggressive attitude from the one server and the rushing everyone out before the seating is done both of us felt very much like our presence was an inconvenience at this salon.

There are much better options in the city. I’m definitely going to return to have high tea at other salons in the future. We have absolutely no desire to come back here unfortunately.

It was an incredibly disappointing birthday...

OMG save yourself the trouble and do not waste your time! We made a reservation for 11, we were running late because we couldn’t find parking (there’s not a lot of parking near here) so we were like 10 mins late. I called and they’re like “it’s fine if you’re late but you still have to leave at 1230” and that attitude set the precedent of the whole experience. Along with other reviews, the service is terrible. We wanted to share the food tower and our waitress argued with us for like 5 mins about how we’re not allowed to and then Finally she’s “ok fine whatever I can’t force you to get your own, so you can share if you have to”. And everyone around is sharing??? We get our food and order our tea and 20 mins goes by. No one brings us more water, no one checks on how the food is (which is the best part) and no one asks if we want more tea. They say it’s unlimited tea but it’s funny because they never check on you so it’s impossible to order more than 2 in the 90 min time slot they put you in. Then, 40 minutes before our reservation is over (11:50) they’re like “last call.” Even though our reservation was good until 1230. We didn’t even last an hour. The energy is awful the service is terrible we just wanted to get out as fast as possible. Our waitress stopped talking to us and someone else took over even though she was still working. I would not come back. It was impossible to get the waitress attention (I posted pics of their backs turned to us but owner asked me to remove so I did) Their backs were turned to the customers the entire time.

Per your review response I deleted the images I understand your response, we were upset about the quality of service. It’s not what she said, it’s how she said it. She was rude from the very beginning and so was the lady on the phone. She literally stopped checking on us and talking to us Like she completely abandoned our table. A different person brought us our bill because she never came back. That’s terrible service? You also literally cannot order unlimited tea as your advertise because your servers don’t come around enough to order that frequently. You really should check your other reviews too, I’m not the only one complaining about the service but I noticed I’m the only one you’ve responded to recently. A lot of other people have complained to. Because of the poor service I wouldn’t return nor would I recommend anyone else to. It’s unfortunate because your food is absolutely delicious. You should focus more on training your waitresses in better customer service, then attacking your customers for expressing their honest opinion of your business. When you go to a tea place like this you expect superb service and it was quite...