The first time I visited The Afternoon Tea Room on West Gandy Street, I ordered the wrong thing. I asked for a large coffee out of pure reflex, and Carrie Collier — the owner, the host, the whole operation on most days — just smiled and said, “We can do that, but let me bring you something first.” She came back with a small pot of a lapsang souchong blend, smoky and deep, and I haven’t ordered coffee there since.
Carrie opened the tea room eleven years ago in a 1920s bungalow that she spent most of a year restoring herself. The floorboards are original; she just sanded them. The pressed-tin ceiling she found buried under two layers of drop tiles. The wallpaper in the front room, a soft green botanical print, she special-ordered from a shop in England after deciding nothing domestic looked right. This is the kind of attention to detail that tells you exactly what kind of person is running the place.
She runs afternoon tea service Wednesday through Sunday, and I’d recommend calling ahead — not because it fills up dramatically, but because she sometimes closes early if the deliveries from her pastry supplier don’t arrive. The full service, which runs about twenty-two dollars per person, comes with a three-tier stand: finger sandwiches on the bottom, fresh scones in the middle, and two or three small sweets on top. The cucumber and herbed cream cheese sandwich is exactly what it sounds like, and that’s a compliment. The scones come with clotted cream she sources from a Texas dairy and a lemon curd she makes herself on Thursday mornings.
I asked Carrie once why she landed on Denison for this. She’d lived in Dallas, worked in hotel hospitality for years, and could have opened something like this anywhere. She said her grandmother had lived here, that she remembered visiting as a child and thinking the old houses on the north side of town were the most beautiful things she’d ever seen. When this bungalow came available, she said it felt less like a business decision and more like a reminder.
The tea list runs about forty options. Carrie doesn’t oversell any of them. She’ll ask you a few questions — do you want something with caffeine, do you like floral notes, are you in the mood for something strong — and then she’ll suggest two or three and let you pick. She stocks a rotating seasonal blend that changes every few months; right now it’s a strawberry rooibos that she admits is a little too sweet for her personal taste but that customers keep asking for.
On weekend afternoons, the front room has maybe eight tables, and they’re usually all occupied by a mix of people: older women who’ve been coming for years, younger women celebrating birthdays or bridal events, the occasional couple who wandered in from Main Street and stayed. Carrie moves through it all without seeming hurried. That unhurried quality is, I think, the actual thing she’s selling.
If you just want a pot of tea and a scone without the full service, she’ll do that too, for around eight dollars. It’s a good way to test it out before committing to the full experience, though most people who come once end up scheduling a return before they leave.
The parking situation is street-only and can be tight on weekends. Get there a few minutes early, walk around the block if you need to, and don’t rush. That would be missing the point.
