Afternoon Tea Awards 2024 - Award of Excellence 

Ugly Butterfly is an award-winning fine dining restaurant and bar located in the idyllic Carbis Bay, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows that offer stunning, panoramic views of the Cornish coastline. Adam’s Afternoon Tea celebrates the history and tradition of the iconic British Afternoon Tea, whilst maintaining Ugly Butterfly’s ethos of celebrating the very best of Cornish produce and reflecting the sustainable philosophy, for which the restaurant has become known. The afternoon tea is served in the Ugly Butterfly bar from Tuesday – Sunday (12pm – 5pm).

It includes selection of sandwiches, savouries, and sweets that all use ingredients from local suppliers. Alongside a selection of sandwiches that evoke traditional Afternoon Tea nostalgia, there are savouries that include the likes of ‘Hog’s pudding sausage roll, waste courgette’, ‘Crab doughnut, lemon peel puree’, ‘Lamb, spiced tartare, kimchi emulsion’, and ‘Corn, brown butter, girolle’. Naturally, no Afternoon Tea is complete without a scone and the Ugly Butterfly tea includes Cornish scones, baked fresh in-house every day, served with Trewithen clotted cream and strawberry jam. The sweet selection is equally as show-stopping, with treats such as, ‘Sea buckthorn custard tart’, which uses sea berries native to Cornwall, ‘Elderflower mousse, pear, shortbread’, with elderflower the team forages from the local area, ‘Lemon verbena, meadowsweet sponge’ and, of course, a traditional Battenberg. There’s also ‘Coffee caramel, Asháninka, chocolate biscuit’, which uses chocolate from Chocolarder, the only bean-to-bar chocolate maker in Cornwall, and one of just a handful in the UK, which shares Ugly Butterfly’s commitment to sustainable and ethical practices.

The Afternoon Tea is accompanied by a selection of teas from Tregothnan Tea, based on the Roseland Peninsula, who planted the very first tea fields in the UK on the Tregothnan Estate which has been maintained by the same family since the 1300’s. There’s a varied selection of bubbles on offer for those who opt for the Champagne Afternoon Tea, from Polgoon Seyval Blanc, Cornwall, to Taittinger Prélude Grand Cru, Champagne, and Krug Grand Cuvee Brut, Champagne. For guests looking to make it a real celebration, there’s also an option to add free-flowing bubbles to the experience.