The seated tea service at the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden is a cherished occasion, a seasonal, three-course tea served in the elegant DeGolyer Tea Room. Available for guests ages 10 and older, reservations are required to secure a spot in this refined celebration. The Lula Mae Slaughter Dining Terrace Grill offers relaxed, counter-style dining for guests looking to take a leisurely break mid-visit, inviting them to enjoy a glass of wine or a cold beer alongside garden views and the open sky. Café on the Green sits along the Paseo de Flores, offering relaxed outdoor dining in one of the garden’s most picturesque corridors, a welcoming stop for the whole family. Set within the historic DeGolyer House, Restaurant DeGolyer offers an intimate dining experience in the elegant indoor Tea Room, available to guests ages 13 and older, as well as outdoor loggia seating with fans and heaters for year-round enjoyment.
The Arboretum’s sweeping green lawns, tranquil atmosphere, and natural setting invite guests to slow down and share a picnic. The seated tea service at the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden is somewhat deceptively named. At least, that’s what you may think if you’ve never had it before. This service is not available year-round but instead offered at strategic times throughout the year - Garden Tea ($64 per person) from mid-spring to early fall, Children’s Tea ($44 for ages 2-10, $64 for adults) during the summer, Harvest Tea ($67 per person) in autumn and Holiday Tea ($72 for indoor seating, $67 for the patio) during the weeks surrounding Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. Pricing includes admission to the Arboretum and parking. The three-course menu for each season of tea is curated accordingly. Soup is served first, and it makes sense that alphabet chicken soup is on the children’s menu while chestnut soup is on the holiday menu.
An assortment of sandwiches filled with chicken salad, cucumbers, turkey and the like are served for the second course. The third course is reserved for sweets - pecan clusters, bundtinis and truffles. Scones are served as well. There’s the tea that changes with each course and matches the season it is being served in. Citrus and mango flavors for Garden Tea. Apple spice and peach ginger for Harvest Tea. White Champagne tea and cranberry apple hibiscus for the holidays and “Yummy Tummy Tea” for the children. Younger children received their own menu when they gained access to the DeGolyer Tea Room in the pre-COVID-19 years. “A couple of years ago, we decided to sit down with the caterer (Gil’s Elegant Catering) and say, ‘What can we do to offer tea that’s for kids under 10, 12 years old that’s appealing to them,’ because they don’t want an egg salad sandwich,” says Angela Rollins, the Arboretum’s special events director. The tea room organizers started offering a few weekends of Children’s Tea, and it always sold out. Even today as the Children’s Tea is on a set schedule, people call in the spring asking when it will start, Rollins says.
In the tea room’s early days, the menu stuck to tradition - i.e., cucumber sandwiches and scones. “We kind of try and keep the same traditions, the classic flavors, but then adding it to where it’s seasonal-based and just a little bit more updated,” Rollins says. The DeGolyer Tea Room opened in the early 2000s as part of the restaurant of the same name. It’s located inside the historic DeGolyer House, a 1939 Spanish Colonial Revival-style home that belonged to oilman and geophysicist Everette DeGolyer and his wife, Nell Goodrich DeGolyer. The tea room today seats 40 people at most and was once used as a family gathering space, Rollins says. “We kind of renovated it and made it the tea room to still have that same atmosphere of just a great gathering place,” she says. “The tea is more of an experience. The space that is now outfitted with blue and metallic-accented teacups, white table cloths and greenery used to be filled with knick-knacks as the Arboretum’s former gift shop, Rollins says. Like the gardens themselves, the tea service is meant to grow and evolve. Menus are updated annually, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll receive the same teas, sandwiches and sweets at the DeGolyer Tea Room next year.
Again, the varied experience is paramount. “Years and years ago, we weren’t really changing the menu a lot,” Rollins says. “That’s kind of when we started to say, ‘Hey, people are getting bored. We need to do something new.”
- Garden Tea (spring to early fall) features citrus and mango flavors and a seasonal three-course menu.
- Harvest Tea (autumn) highlights apple spice and peach ginger profiles with comforting seasonality.
- Holiday Tea (Thanksgiving to New Year) offers white Champagne tea and cranberry apple hibiscus, with options for indoor or patio seating.
Pricing includes admission to the Arboretum and parking. The experiences are designed to be not just meals but seasonal rituals that reflect the garden’s mood and colors. The DeGolyer Tea Room, nestled in the historic DeGolyer House, continues to blend traditional tea-room elegance with evolving menus that keep guests returning for new flavors and familiar comforts alike. The overall approach emphasizes hospitality, picturesque settings, and culinary storytelling through seasonally inspired courses.
