If you want to hold a sophisticated tea party for your friends or family members, there are a few things you’ll want to be sure you include as part of this event so that it looks and feels authentic. Especially if you’ve never held a tea party before, there are a few things that you’ll want to be sure you get right.

To help you with these things, here are three tips for holding a sophisticated tea party.

Choose A Beautiful Tea Set

The most important part of holding a tea party is serving the tea. But with a sophisticated tea party, you don’t just want to serve your tea out of an old teapot; you’ll want to serve it from a beautiful tea server as part of a tea set.

If you already have a tea set, or a few tea sets, you can either choose one that has all matching pieces or that you mix and match with. Or, if you don’t have a tea set yet, consider purchasing one brand new as a matching set, or you could look at secondhand shops to find eclectic pieces that you join together for your tea set. Just make that you have a beautiful teapot, a tea server, teacups, and saucers that go with them.

Provide The Right Foods

Along with the tea that you serve at your tea party, you’ll also want to provide some traditional teatime eats.

In most cases, food that accompanies a tea party should be small and easy to eat. And while there are different courses and types of foods, you’ll serve everything at the same time rather than in courses. As part of your menu, you can include things like small sandwiches, scones and jams, teacakes, buns, biscuits and cookies, pastries, cakes, tarts, and more. The more beautiful the food is, the more picturesque your tea party will feel.

Strive For Proper Etiquette

It’s not just the food and drink that make for a real, sophisticated tea party. At tea, you’ll also want to help everyone know and adhere to certain etiquette rules.

While there are a lot of rules to a traditional tea party, some of the rules that you may want to encourage your guests to follow so that you can all feel sophisticated without feeling like you’re keeping things too rigid could include things like serving your guests in the right order, keeping your pinkies in while drinking your tea, bringing the items to your mouth rather than leaning over, and eating everything with your utensils. You can also have everyone focus on maintaining their posture as they sit, which is a real challenge for people in today’s world.

If you want to hold a sophisticated tea party at your next event, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you in doing this the right way.