The Tea Cart at Old Water Street Inn — Restaurant in Winchester

We had a group of 8 attend The Diamond Ball: A Bridgerton Tea. On the website to purchase tickets, you could not purchase 8 tickets, the max was 6. For 8 or more you were instructed to call or message. I called, no answer. Left a message, no response. Messaged the company page on Facebook from the event and did not get a response for days initially. The event was gaining traction and I was fearful that if I waited much longer for someone to return my call, we would miss out on tickets at all. With that in mind, I went ahead and purchased the maximum number of tickets (6) online and had another member of our party purchase the other two. I immediately sent another message to the company page asking if the 6 tickets and the 2 tickets could be combined to sit together. Immediately the answer was "yes, of course". I sent the name of the woman that purchased the two tickets and my information to ensure they had the details necessary to accommodate the switch and our party of 8.

A few days passed and I wanted to be sure that our group would be seated together, so I called The Tea Cart Winchester and spoke with a staff member. They again said accommodating our group of 8 was no problem and that they made a note in both of our reservations noting as such. With all this, you can imagine my surprise when our party of 8 walked into the event, to find that the two ticket table was in fact NOT seated with us.

The host initially seemed like she would be able to remedy the situation for us and would get back to me. I saw her again about 15 minutes later and asked for an update. Her response, "I talked to the servers and they said they cannot move anything or add chairs." I was disappointed, and I offered a compromise, could we be seated in two tables of 4 guests each rather than 6 and 2? Her response, "probably not."

She offered no solutions to the issue at hand. I completely understand the difficult situation as the event was sold out, but there are customer centric ways to handle these problems and it was clear that the staff was not trained to do so.

Following the second interaction, the same host, was in front of me in line for a drink at the beverage trailer (which was a whole other issue but I digress). She expressed to a member of our group that, "I do not really know what is going on, I showed up for my shift and was not given much information on this." That response is not something that should be shared with customers, let alone customers that paid almost $100/ticket (with fees, etc.) to attend the event. A simple, "no but I will find out" would suffice in that situation and would result in a much better customer experience. I then asked if there was a manager I could speak with and she said yes that she would get her. She did not.

Once the 6 of us got to our table inside (the 2 other guests were seated upstairs far away from us), we spoke with our server, Mikayla, and she said, "We can add those two! I wish I would have known sooner, I would have already adjusted the table."

So the host (who I will not name) lied to my fact multiple times about speaking with our server and saying that she said it could not be adjusted, when the truth was that she just did not want to be bothered with trying to fix their error!

The food was delicious although the portions are small - it is a tea after all. The drink trailer outside was confusing and unclear. The event was nice but it did not include the elements that were advertised. We enjoyed how everyone dressed up and the actors from Winchester Little Theatre were a nice touch.

TLDR: The staff did not do what they said they would do regarding our reservation prior to the event thus resulting in our group being separately seated floors away from one another. Our server did what she could to accommodate. We had a good time, only because we were able to sit together and enjoyed one...

My daughter and I had been to your tea room in Berryville , years ago when you were newly in business and it was lovely. As a Christmas event , and hopefully to make it a yearly tradition, I booked a tea for the two of us at your Winchester location. I seldom write a review but feel that I needed to in this case.

Positives: Beautiful setting in old historical home Wait staff friendly and appropriately dressed .

Cons:

Food served was stale and most likely prepped very well in advance . Server was friendly but upon arriving we were told they were short staffed. Staff seemed frazzled. Server was asked twice for cream to go with tea and did not offer complimentary cocktail or mocktail. We overheard it being offered so had to ask our waitress. 4.Tea stain on our tablecloth, next table over had tea cups replaced due to being not clean . Food: for the premium price , food was very sub par much to our disappointment. The replacement for the warm entree( crescent sausage roll )since I am vegetarian , was a wilted spinach type salad. Since you were replacing warm entree, perhaps another warm entree would have been enjoyed . Soup served was barely warm. Scone served was plain….reminded me of a regular biscuit. Bread seem stale on all finger sandwiches and made well in advance of serving. Booking: deceiving on line booking: automatic 20% tip added to bill. thought the price for the tea was $50 , I don’t remember it being mentioned it was a Nut Cracker tea. Cost was $60. $ 66 for vegetarian which included 2 replacements… wilted like spinach salad and a humus finger sandwich…stale bread.Nothing seemed freshly prepared.

Since my daughter and I enjoy trying tea rooms, this experience was very disappointing. I do not mind paying the price but the quality of food serve should...

This place is so cute! Friends and I were celebrating a birthday. I can’t remember the last time I went to a tea party! Simply Devine!

The atmosphere is perfect. The food was very good. The teas we tried were wonderful. I particularly loved the Shenandoah Blue. The staff was friendly.

It’s a new place and I guess that means an all new staff which explains the hiccups in service. They didn’t have our reservation and although finding a spot was easy, I felt they could have covered their error more graciously rather than continuing to refer to us as “walk ins”. We had to ask for water several times before we got it. The server didn’t really know much about tea or the selections. It took a long while to get our first course and then the subsequent courses felt rushed. In the end, they asked us to leave because we were still just finishing up and apparently took too long.

This place is great. There’s tons of potential but the service does need to improve. I’ll probably my wait a bit before coming back, and hopefully the staff will be more...