Review of Essence Cafe - Beach Rotana Abu Dhabi

I've been craving sweets all week and today I am fully satisfied! I went to the Essence Cafe for afternoon tea. We sat in the lobby area as I really enjoyed the natural light but they have ample seats in the cafe area. There are menus on all the lobby tables for browsing. We started looking through it and I was pretty set on having the afternoon tea set. My hubby already had a full lunch so he opted for dessert and coffee. We ordered from our server, I believe we had 2 different servers who came by at different intervals.  The set does take a maximum of 30 minutes to prepare which the server will tell you when you do order it. For us it took maybe 15-20 minutes, the wait did not seem very long at all.
After ordering, our server came with welcome drinks. It was a pleasant surprise and it made the wait seem less long. The drink was a fruity mock tail.. Tasted like Sprite. Then came out drinks. I ordered a black tea. It came with a full pot. And my hubbys coffee also came with a full pot. Neither of us finished our pots. The black tea I ordered I preferred it to be more rich and bold but this one was a bit light. As well there was no strainer in the pot so I did get some leaves. Nonetheless the China it came in was beautiful.
I was impressed when the main afternoon set came. It came in a large 3 tier afternoon set besutifully presented. Each item came in a pair and there were at least 11 items.  in total 22 items for 1 person was more than enough! each item was so delicately made. I wanted to eat it all but I was super full to my stomach I cannot imagine this full set is for only 1 person. Ensure you have at least 2 people for 1 set for afternoon tea at this place. The set came with 4 types of sandwiches - asparagus, salmon, salami, egg. It comes with scone, a strawberry cake and a brownie and the top layer has macarons, a cone pastry, a pudding and a blueberry tart.
These definitely will change overtime by the cafe.
Some of the noteworthy items are the macarons- covered in gold flakes. And the strawberry/raspberry cake also have gold flakes dusted on top. The asparagus sand which was great and the scones come with clotted cream and jam. Service was impeccable and the price was great too. It's 139AED for the full set including the drink. Really this set serves 2 people tho!