Tearoom

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For tearooms used in Japanese tea ceremony, see Japanese teahouse.

A tearoom is a small room or restaurant where beverages and light meals are served, often catering chiefly to women and having a sedate or subdued atmosphere.

Entrance and outside seating, Tchai-Ovna Tearooms.

A customer might expect to receive cream tea or Devonshire tea, often served from a china set, and a scone with jam and clotted cream – alternatively a High tea may be served. In Scotland teas are usually served with a variety of scones, pancakes, crumpets and other cakes.

In a related usage, a tearoom may be a room set aside in a workplace for workers to relax and (specifically) take refreshment during work-breaks. Traditionally a staff member serving food and beverages in such a tearoom would have been called a tea lady.

The Willow Tearooms.

Room de Luxe, The Willow Tearooms.

1 Historical development
2 Alternative meanings or usage
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Historical development

In the 18th century tea was an expensive (and heavily taxed) luxury for the rich, also available in Coffee houses. After doubts and arguments about possible health risks and the suitability of the beverage for "persons of an inferior rank", the increasing reaction to working class drunkenness in the temperance movement led to tea being promoted as an alternative, and from the 1830s many new cafes and coffee houses opened up as a temperance alternative to pubs and inns.

The tea room itself was developed towards the end of the century. In 1878 Catherine Cranston opened the first of what became a chain of Miss Cranston's Tea Rooms in Glasgow, Scotland, providing elegant well designed social venues which for the first time provided for well-to-do women socialising without male company and which proved widely popular. She engaged up and coming designers, becoming a patron of Charles Rennie Mackintosh who designed several interiors, and the complete building of The Willow Tearooms which provided a strikingly modern exterior as well as a series of interesting interior designs. Similar establishments became popular throughout Scotland, but as late as 1901 Glasgow men were remarking on the lack of "tea shops" in London.

However, from the 1880s fine hotels in both the United States and England began to offer tea service in tea rooms and tea courts, and by 1910 they had begun to host afternoon tea dances as dance crazes swept both the U.S. and the UK. Tea rooms were established catering for all classes of British society, most notably the chain set up by J. Lyons and Co. who opened their first teashop in 1894 at 213 Piccadilly, London, and set up a series of tea rooms known as Lyons Corner Houses. Tea rooms of all kinds were widespread in Britain by the 1950s, but in the following decades cafés became more fashionable, and tea rooms became less common. Country tea rooms offering cream teas are still a tourist attraction in many areas, particularly in Devon and Cornwall, and tea rooms can be found in most towns and villages. In Glasgow, The Willow Tearooms have been restored after years of having been absorbed into a department store, and now run a recreation of other Mackintosh interiors in another establishment in Buchanan Street near the site of one of her original tea rooms.

[edit] Alternative meanings or usage

The phrase tearoom is also gay slang referring to a venue where public sex occurs, referring to tea rooms such as Lyons, but also typically a public toilet: T-Room = Toilet Room (see also cottaging or glory hole). Sociologist Laud Humphreys has written a controversial book on this subject titled Tearoom trade: Impersonal sex in public places, (ISBN 0-202-30283-0) which is often referenced in the context of ethics due to his nonstandard research techniques.

Tea room can also refer to a room in a larger home where the woman of the house could entertain her female companions over a cup of tea free from male interference.

In the US, after the end of World War II the car was finally affordable for the middle-class. This led to an explosion of travelling vacations and sight seeing. Tearooms were establish across the country, serving lunch or snacks to women who wouldn't dream of going to a coffee shop unescorted. Largely run by housewives or widows, they were open limited hours and offered a menu of regional comfort food.