540 Fisgard St.
11am to 4:30pm seven days a week
$39.00 per person
Reservations recommended but walk-ins welcome
250.590.3953 or https://www.venussophia.com/victoriaafternoontea/

THE EXPERIENCE
A very wet Sunday found us at Venus Sophia, a cute tea room located in the heart of Chinatown in downtown Victoria. It has been there since 2011, offering vegetarian tea and lunches. We both loved the eclectic mix of tables, chairs, plates and tea cups. It offered us a ‘shabby chic’ place to shelter from the torrential rain that was falling the day that we chose to try it.

Venus Sophia had great reviews on Trip Advisor and its website states that it holds “international recognition from prestigious publications”. Oh, it hurts….because we cannot offer the same praise.

It looks good, doesn’t it?

If we are being generous, we could say the food was average. The sandwiches were made using delicious local bread but every single one seemed to contain similar vegetarian cream cheese fillings as a base. Even worse, the so-called meat substitute items were filled with oddly texture bean fillings. And the pastries. Guys. The pastries were stale. If your gloved hand flew to your throat, that is the correct reaction. No high tea snob worth their salt will fail to remark on stale pastries. Angela had to delicately remove a cake from her mouth because it was an odd cross between deadly dry corn cake and almond flour. We wondered…..maybe they baked once a week? Had we somehow managed to land on the end of their baking week?

What is this? We don’t know. It wasn’t explained and it was inedible.

Now, dear readers, you know that we take our high tea tasting very seriously. We eat every. single. thing. so that you have a full accounting of the high tea on offer and we have full lady tummies. At Venus Sophia, things were left. Plates were not cleaned. Even our commitment to tasting excellence could not force us to finish. At $39 per person, it is neither great value for money nor a particularly good example of the dreamy goodness high tea can be.

Even though the tea was a bust, we got this great nurses-drink-tea collage out of it. Win?

RATING
Charlotte voted for 1.5/5 balls. Angela couldn’t cut the tea ball graphic in half. So Venus Sophia and its internet acclaimed tea get 2/5 balls on a technicality and sits solidly at the bottom of our high tea experiences.