It’s a Golden Age for Asian-Style Afternoon Tea in the Bay Area

On a recent Saturday morning, about a dozen elegantly dressed pastry lovers, decked out in their finest Regency-era gowns and dainty flower hats, promenaded into the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Up the museum’s bright red staircase they went, pausing occasionally to snap a selfie, until they’d reached the second-floor cafe, where a handsome spread of teacakes and finger sandwiches awaited.

The occasion? A Bridgerton-themed tea party, which the cafe, Kopi Bar, had timed to coincide with the soapy Netflix costume drama’s fourth season premiere. Thus, the cavalcade of pearls and frilly chiffon gowns. Everything about the event appeared to be oh-so-perfectly British in its sensibilities — except that the food displayed on the wooden two-tier cake stands wasn’t only your typical array of scones, clotted cream and cucumber sandwiches.

Cinnamon-roll-like pastry swirls shot through with sweet pandan and coconut sat next to crispy beef rendang samosas. Curried tuna salad topped delicate open-face sourdough brioche sandwiches. And while one sandwich did feature sliced cucumbers, they were mainly there to provide a cooling counterpoint to the fiery sambal-spiked egg salad on top.

This is the kind of food that chef-owner Nora Haron likes to serve at Kopi Bar — a reflection of her background as a Singaporean immigrant of Indonesian-Indian descent. And while the spread might have surprised some Anglophile tea party enthusiasts, anyone who’s taken high tea at, say, one of Singapore’s grand hotels would find the mix of Eastern and Western flavors utterly familiar.

After all, in countries like Singapore and Malaysia, where afternoon tea is a well-loved remnant of British colonization, it’s standard practice to combine the format and the aesthetics of English-style tea service with an infusion of Asian flavors. There, too, Haron likes to point out, guests get dressed up and sip their Earl Grey with their pinkies out.

The Bay Area has its own rich tea party traditions, mostly nodding to the British style. But up until a couple of years ago, it was nearly impossible to find this kind of hybridized, Asian-inspired afternoon tea service.

That’s no longer the case. In fact, we’re experiencing something of a golden age for Asian-style afternoon tea here in the Bay Area, as new pop-ups and standalone tea rooms crop up to satisfy the growing demand.

To wit: Kopi Bar’s aforementioned Bridgerton tea series will take over a section of the cafe every Saturday at least through the end of February. Little Moon Bakehouse, an Asian American vegan baking company in Oakland, hosts “reimagined” afternoon tea pop-ups at different venues around the Bay — packing 100 sweets lovers onto, say, the second floor of San Francisco’s Ferry Building for moon cakes and mini pork floss buns. Meanwhile, Pamana Plantas, a plant store in Berkeley, has started throwing kamayan-inspired Filipino tea parties, lining the tables with banana leaves and ube pastries. And while the afternoon tea program at San Francisco’s Son & Garden, a lavishly flower-bedecked spot from the owners of the Farmhouse Thai restaurant empire, doesn’t have an explicit Asian focus, its themed tea sets often include delicacies like Japanese cherry blossom cookies and homemade samosas.

Then there’s the OG of the genre, Alameda’s Malaya Tea Room, which has served elegant Malaysian afternoon tea sets, both in person and as a take-home kit, for nearly seven years.

For her part, Haron says the tea parties have by far been her most popular events since she started hosting them last year. After she moved Kopi Bar to Berkeley from its original Walnut Creek location this past fall, she received a steady stream of DMs from old customers, pleading with her: “Please, please, will you do this again?”

In response to such a groundswell of support, Haron says, laughing, “How can I not?”

Reclaiming a colonial history

Of course, the British were the ones who brought the practice of a light afternoon meal with tea to Singapore and Malaysia during their long period of colonial rule — from 1819 to 1963, in the case of Singapore. The Raffles Hotel, probably the most iconic place to take tea in Singapore, started offering its afternoon tea service — complete with live orchestra — in 1918.

“The new enterprise should be warmly encouraged by the public of both sexes who often find the hours between 4:30 and dinner time hang heavily,” an article in Singaporean newspaper The Straits Times enthused at the time. Meanwhile, a popular restaurant called Emmerson’s Tiffin Room was advertising a more modest daily afternoon tea as early as 1898.

These initial offerings were mostly geared toward Singapore’s British residents, as well as wealthy travelers visiting from Europe. But the custom of taking afternoon tea was eventually taken up by locals as well — and persisted long after the British left.

Local expressions of the tradition began as early as the 1960s, says KF Seetoh, probably the foremost street food expert in Singapore. Cafes began selling kaya toast and local coffee in the afternoon; curry puffs and pandan cakes also first appeared around this time.

“These days at Raffles, you’ll find Indian tiffin meals and tiered trays of high tea offerings, [everything] from the usual British fare to even Nyonya cakes,” Seetoh says. “The evolution [can be] credited to finding an identity true to the mishmash of cultures in Singapore — the best of everyone’s kitchens and grandmas’ recipes.”

A similar story played out in Malaysia. For Malaya Tea Room owner Leena Lim, going out for tea was an occasional mother-daughter treat she remembers enjoying all through her childhood. Every couple of months, her mother would bring her to afternoon tea at the Shangri-La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, where she’d marvel at all of the fancy cakes and finger sandwiches.

“It was such an intimate, beautiful experience,” she says.

Back then, in the ’80s and ’90s, most of the upscale hotel afternoon tea places in Malaysia still served food that was overwhelmingly British. At most, Lim recalls, maybe one item — say, a curry puff — would nod toward the local food culture. Because afternoon tea at the big hotels was “fancy” and expensive, Lim says even locals wanted the food to be authentically British. Why would anyone pay so much to eat a Malaysian snack they could buy down the street for just a few ringgits?

Lim estimates it’s only in the last 10 years or so that even the fanciest British-style tea rooms in Malaysia and Singapore have started leaning more into local flavors, adding sambals and curries and kuehs (assorted bite-size treats made with glutinous rice) into the mix with the scones and cucumber sandwiches that people still expect.

When Lim opened Malaya Tea Room in 2019, on a quiet stretch of Central Avenue in Alameda, she wanted it to be more of a hybrid. At the time, she didn’t know of any other businesses that were throwing Asian–inspired afternoon tea parties. Beloved local institutions like Lovejoy’s more or less replicate the British traditions.

Lim wanted to do both. She planned to do the British stuff just as well as, or maybe even better than, the purely Anglophilic places — to, for instance, be one of the only places that make their clotted cream from scratch. But she also wanted to introduce customers to elegant, afternoon tea versions of some of her favorite Malaysian street snacks — in other words, to serve food that actually tastes good. (She’d grown to find the British standards to be quite bland and boring.) Her menu included one finger sandwich that’s based on kaya toast, another that combines pork floss with a homemade basil spread, and yet another that features bakkwa (Malaysian pork jerky).

When my family arrived at Malaya on a recent Sunday, the atmosphere inside the cozy tea room was languid and vaguely tropical — lush greenery sprawled in every direction; a ceiling fan spun lazily up above. Nostalgic knickknacks (antique Chinese vases, an abacus, an old Hup Seng cracker tin) decorated the display cabinets. On the table was a little bell to ring when you were ready for your server to come take your order.

The sandwiches we loved best included the curry chicken, made with coconut milk and a secret spice blend, and a sardine-and-cucumber number that Lim makes by doctoring the canned sardines in tomato sauce that you can buy at Asian grocers. On the sweets side, we enjoyed an airy-light pandan chiffon cake that wasn’t too sweet — the ultimate compliment for an Asian dessert.

Even the egg salad sandwich, which we ordered off the British side of the menu, was uncommonly good — lush with Kewpie mayonnaise and served on fluffy milk bread. It tasted exactly like the ones you get at 7-Eleven in Japan.

Lim says that’s exactly what she was going for: a familiar flavor that reminds you of childhood.

Her business has had its ups and downs over the past seven years, especially with the pandemic hitting just months after it opened. But she’s developed a loyal customer base, and people do seem to better understand Malaya’s afternoon tea offerings now than they did in the shop’s early days. Part of that, she says, just has to do with how much more popular Asian food is these days — how there’s now a cultural cachet to being the sort of person who understands pandan and ube: “Otherwise, it’s like who are you? Do you even live here?”

It helps that afternoon tea is the ultimate Instagram-friendly meal. Plus, Lim says, “people love dressing up,” and going out for tea provides a rare opportunity to do that. Every year, she has a big group that comes in cosplaying as anime characters.

During our visit, we spotted a group of three elderly women enjoying a quiet conversation, a table of Gen Z Taiwanese ladies chattering happily in Mandarin, and a group of white otaku having an intense debate about Dragon Ball Z.

“Now I even get groups of men who come in by themselves,” Lim says. “I think that’s awesome.”

Tea with a twist

The bakeries and cafes that offer Asian-style afternoon tea in the Bay Area all have their own charm — and their own little twists on the genre.

Little Moon Bakehouse owner Annie Wang says her pop-ups are a natural extension of the fact that she started baking bread for the first time in 2024, adding a variety of Chinese bakery–style buns to her repertoire of plant-based cookies and mooncakes. Unlike Wang’s other baked goods, the breads don’t have long enough of a shelf life to ship nationally.

“I realized that this would be great for an experience,” she says. She started renting out venues across the Bay Area to host one-day afternoon tea pop-ups, filling up three-tier cake stands with an equal split of sweet and savory treats.

On Feb. 22, she’ll host her second tea pop-up in the San Francisco Ferry Building — a Lunar New Year–themed bash for 100 guests, seated at long tables that stretch the length of the festive second-floor Grand Hall.

The menu will include miniature pork floss buns, garlic butter buns, and citrus zest sugar cookies filled with soy sauce–spiked white chocolate (that one is a collaboration with Heydoh, a Taiwanese American soy sauce brand). In the coming months, she’ll host additional pop-ups in SF Chinatown, the Sunset District and San José.

Meanwhile, Jai Kandayah, the owner of Pleasanton’s recently closed Curry Leaves Bistro, says he never intended to serve afternoon tea at his restaurant. He, too, grew up taking afternoon tea in Malaysia, but not the kind served at fancy hotels, which wasn’t accessible for working-class people. For the majority of Malaysians, afternoon tea — or high tea — was more of a home ritual.

(In Kandayah’s experience, Malaysians are more likely to talk about “high tea” than afternoon tea, referring to a heartier meal eaten later in the afternoon, at perhaps 4 or 5 p.m. after they get home from work — much more practical for working-class folks who can’t leave their jobs to eat cakes for an hour at 2 in the afternoon.)

These meals always featured local flavors, Kandayah recalls. “I remember my mom would make a big pot of tea in the afternoon and then usually a savory snack — banana fritters, fried yucca, fried yams, fried taro,” he says. Sometimes the bread man would come around, and they’d buy a loaf and dip the bread in the curry that was left over from lunch.

The local high tea buffets he remembers frequenting as a young man similarly skewed toward Malaysian flavors. Many of them would even serve fried noodles.

But again, Kandayah never had a high tea menu at Curry Leaves Bistro. Instead, regular customers — all of them older Malaysian immigrants — would knock on his door on Friday or Saturday afternoons, when the restaurant was closed.

“People would call and say, ‘Hey, there are eight of us coming in at 4 o’clock after our golf game. Can you prepare some tea and roti, and a plate of noodles?’” Kandayah says. “And we would do that.”

Curry Leaves Bistro wound up closing this past fall after the landlord increased the rent, but Kandayah has already scouted out a new location in the East Bay and hopes to reopen later this year.

This time, he says, afternoon tea on the restaurant’s backyard patio is going to come officially baked into the program.

A celebration of immigration

Meanwhile, Kopi Bar has leaned into the cosplay of it all. In addition to her Bridgerton series, Haron has also hosted Bollywood- and Arabian Nights–themed afternoon teas, and encourages guests to come dressed up to reflect the theme. People come for Haron’s stellar baked goods, sure. But they also come because the tea parties are joyful and extravagant — an all-out happening, as they say.

And for Haron, in the current political climate — while masked federal agents whisk soccer moms and five-year-old kids away to far-off detention centers — her tea parties aren’t just some frivolous, let-them-eat-cake moments to cosplay as British aristocrats. They’re important rituals that allow immigrants like her to come together and celebrate.

“This idea of ‘illegal’ immigrants being criminals — that’s obnoxious. We’re doing something for the community. You know, we’re bringing people together. We’re creating jobs,” she says. “So it’s wonderful to be able to support one another this way.”

After all, she says, food is intertwined with the immigration process. And traditions like afternoon tea are a vital way for immigrants to maintain their cultural identity.

Back in Singapore and Malaysia, the history of afternoon tea followed the same path as so many other things in Southeast Asia: The colonizers brought it, but locals improved it.

As the food writer Seetoh puts it, “You can still spend over a hundred bucks for the little pinky high teas at posh hotels flavored with affluence, but the majority, even the well-heeled, prefer a kueh salat, curry puff or ang ku kueh at local cafes.”

“It feels more like a Singapore story,” he says.

So it goes here in the diaspora, as Asian Americans create a new set of traditions replete with sourdough, vegan pork floss and the Bay Area’s own unique sense of swagger. They, too, are making afternoon tea their own.

Kopi Bar’s Bridgerton high tea series will run every Saturday through Feb. 28, plus an additional date on March 1, with seatings at 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. Tickets are limited. The cafe is located on the second floor of BAMPFA, at 2155 Center St. in Berkeley.

Little Moon Bakehouse’s Lunar New Year–themed afternoon tea will take place on Feb. 22, 11:30-1:30 p.m., at the SF Ferry Building (1 Ferry Building, San Francisco). Tickets are limited. Future tea events are scheduled to take place in SF Chinatown, the Sunset District, and San José.

Malaya Tea Room has three seatings per day, Thu.-Sun., at 11 a.m., 1:15 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. It’s located at 920 Central Ave. in Alameda.