Escape to Nassau Street for Victorian teatime at Sally Lunn's Tea Shop

Sally Lunn's is rarely frequented by Princeton students although it is located close to campus.

Tucked into the shops along Nassau Street, about a block away from the main campus gate, Sally Lunn's Tea Shop serves lunch and tea in the early afternoons. When you step in the door, it feels as if you are walking into a Victorian spinster's drawing room. The dining room is full of little tables covered by lace tablecloths, and toward the back, there is a window alcove, on which are arranged various jams and teas.

The lunch menu consists of their daily specials, which include sandwiches in addition to hot dishes such as shepherd's pie and regular menu selections. While the menu is not extensive, it offers up a decent variety of typical British food such as soups, Cornish pasties, chicken pot pie and melt sandwiches. In addition to the meal selections, they also have a tea menu, where they offer pastries, desserts, scones and crumpets.

As you walk into the tea room, a bell clangs, and a waitress immediately comes to seat you. In keeping with the Victorian parlor theme, the waitresses all wear starched white eyelet pinafores.

The entrees — a seafood melt sandwich and a Cornish pastie — come with a choice of potato, mixed greens or garden salad. The mixed green salad, which contained leaf lettuce, arugula, spinach, and other greens. The Dijon vinaigrette dressing, while good, was very strong. The cooks had spooned it out generously, and it overpowered the taste of the greens. If you like to taste the contents of your salad, I would recommend asking for the dressing on the side.

A Cornish pastie is a pastry, somewhat like a calzone, filled with ground lamb, potatoes, leeks, carrots and other vegetables. While Sally Lunn's pastie was hearty and filling, with the pastry dough flaky and cooked to perfection, it was absolutely bland, lacking even adequate salt.

In comparison to the pastie, the seafood melt looked positively scrumptious. Made of lobster, crab, and shrimp, all tucked under a layer of melted cheese and served open-faced on a Sally Lunn roll, it smelled delicious. While everything else was fine, the roll was a little too chewy.

Though the plates are filling, do not leave the tea room without sampling some of the tea and scones for which it is famous. The chamomile tea was delicious, and it came with generous amounts of honey and lemon, which went perfectly with the strawberry scone.

The scone was buttery and delicious. Sally Lunn's serves their scones with generous portions of both clotted cream and homemade jam, which were delicious.

Sally Lunn's is an affordable lunchtime treat that offers a hearty meal and a nice atmosphere. The food, though a bit bland, is hearty and filling; the salad vegetables are crisp and fresh; and the pastries are baked fresh daily.

In addition to the dine-in lunch room, Sally Lunn's also has a small basement shop where you can buy desserts, hot chocolate and cider, and they are open from morning until late afternoon. For a short walk down Nassau Street, Sally Lunn's offers good food and the opportunity to retreat to Victorian England for an afternoon lunch or tea.