Yep, glad we are able to resurrect threads.

I still haven't made all of these yummies yet but I'm trying.

Tea rooms in the United States are a type of restaurant that originated in the early 20th century to serve, primarily, ladies who lunch.  Their inspiration may have been British tearooms, but the similarity is superficial.  Tea rooms are definitely restaurants.  Before and after Prohibition, I think they were distinctly viewed as proper places for unescorted ladies, because they did not serve alcohol. 

One very interesting aspect of these tea rooms is that they were always run by women.  In fact, I think it’s safe to say that from around 1900 to 1950 or1960, that is exactly what it meant—a restaurant owned and run by a woman for the benefit of women, while the word “restaurant” was understood to be run by men for a mixed crowd.

There’s an incredibly rich history of those establishments, all of which are gone in reality, though some survive in name only. 

There are a few sites that have gathered some information on them.  One of my favorites is the restaurant-history blog run by Jan Whitaker:

restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com...

Ms. Whitaker also wrote a book on the subject, Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America.

Another fascinating aspect of the tea room was its role in providing entrepreneurial prospects to African-American women, at a time when opportunities were very limited.  One can argue that running a tea room is just an extension of domestic service, but these women ran businesses when so few women—black or white—were doing that.  Ms. Whitaker has written about that, too.

restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com...

Another site that promises much but delivers only a little is this one:

www.vintagetearooms.net/index.htm...

I think tea rooms were a distinctly Southern and Midwestern thing.  Maybe I’m wrong about that, or just biased by the great number of tea rooms I have known in the South, and how few—actually, none— I noticed in the Northeast.

Another funny thing about American uses of that little word “tea” is the fantastic euphemism “tea dance”.  In origin, the phrase meant exactly what it said, an afternoon dance party that included a table set out with tea and teatime snacks.  But during Prohibition, the phrase came to mean a liquored-up night of debauchery, and the “tea dance” description served either to cover up the truth of the matter, or—more likely—to make a joke out of the whole thing.

More recently, “tea dance” has referred to Sunday events at gay bars in states where Sunday liquor sales were prohibited.  The bars would serve food on that one day as a way to get around the liquor laws.