What it is
The English Rose is a proper tea room, in the sense that an Englishwoman means it: loose tea in a pot, steeped the full three minutes and poured through a strainer into fine bone china, milk added last, with scones, clotted cream and preserves, finger sandwiches with the crusts off, and small cakes on a tiered stand. Jo Gemmill opened it on Easy Street in Carefree in 2002, a few months after signing the lease in the shaken weeks following September 11, because she had moved from England to Arizona and could not find a decent cup of tea. On opening day she cooked for thirty people and 150 came. The room has been full since.
The list runs to about fifty teas. There is a lunch menu of soups, salads and sandwiches for people who want to eat rather than take tea, a cream tea for people who only want the scones, a children’s tea, etiquette classes that Gemmill teaches herself, and a gift shop of tins and china. And there is the hat box: a collection of extravagant hats that guests may borrow for the sitting. Children take one without being asked. So do a surprising number of grandmothers.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale, for all its resorts, does not do this. The hotels pour afternoon tea in December as an event; the English Rose does it every day as a habit, in a small room, at a price that is about a resort cocktail and a half. It is the Valley’s best-known tea room by a distance, named best afternoon tea by Phoenix New Times in 2020 and repeatedly by Phoenix Magazine’s readers, and the 38-minute drive is part of the point: Carefree is a town built for sitting still, and tea is the right thing to do in it.
The practical version
Open Tuesday through Sunday until four, closed Monday. Book ahead, always for weekends and December. Park on Easy Street or in the lots behind the sundial plaza. Allow ninety minutes; tea is not a quick lunch.
When to go
November through April is Carefree’s season and the room’s. Weekday afternoons are calm; weekends book out. December is the hardest month to get a table and the best one to have it, with the room dressed for Christmas and the gardens lit outside. Mother’s Day and the art-festival weekends on Easy Street are the other sellouts. Summer is the quiet time, when a walk-in on a Wednesday is possible and the air conditioning makes a hot pot of tea seem like a reasonable idea.
The last seating, around two, is the sleeper: the lunch tables have gone, the light through the windows is low, and nobody is waiting for your table.
What to order
The full afternoon tea, once, so you have done it. Choose a tea you do not know from the long list rather than the one you drink at home, and ask; the staff know the list and enjoy the question. The scones are the test of any tea room and these pass. If you have come for lunch, the soups and the sandwiches are honest and the cream tea afterward is the compromise. Buy a tin on the way out.
The hats
Take one. The hat box is the house custom, it costs nothing, and the photograph is better than any you will take at the sundial.
The neighborhood
Easy Street is Carefree’s gallery row, running uphill from the sundial and the Desert Gardens past wine rooms and the Giordano’s trattoria. Venues Café is beside the dial for anyone in the party who refuses tea. The Spanish Village block, with Keeler’s and the Black Mountain Coffee Shop, is two minutes down Ho Hum Road. The Boulders is five minutes south.
With kids
This is one of the better outings in the north Valley for a child between five and twelve: a children’s tea, the hats, the stand of small things, a town square with a giant sundial afterward. Our Scottsdale with kids note pairs it with the gardens next door.
The story
Jo Gemmill’s account of the founding is the one the room tells: an English transplant, a state without tea, a lease signed in the autumn of 2001 when the country was in no mood to open anything, and an opening day that drew five times the guests the kitchen had planned for. The tea room became a fixture of Carefree quickly, and then, from 2011, something larger, when Downton Abbey made Sunday-night Anglophiles out of half the country and sent them looking for scones. The room rode six seasons of that and held a goodbye party for the show when it ended in 2016, the year Arizona PBS came to film Gemmill pouring and explaining the three-minute steep. The awards followed: Phoenix Magazine’s readers more than once, Phoenix New Times in 2020, and in 2022 the room marked twenty years, having written its own reflection on the two decades.
What is notable is how little has changed. The list is still around fifty teas, the china is still bone, the hats are still in the box, and Gemmill still teaches the etiquette class. In a town that was planned in the 1950s as a place where nothing would happen, the English Rose is the institution that took the brief literally.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s resort teas in December are the city’s version of this, and they are grander and far more expensive. The English Rose is the everyday original that the resort events imitate for a month, and the reason that a Scottsdale grandmother with a visiting granddaughter has been driving up Scottsdale Road on a Saturday for twenty years. For a birthday, our birthdays note lists it among the places that make the occasion without a bill that spoils it.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north across Carefree Highway, where it becomes Tom Darlington Drive; right on Cave Creek Road, left on Easy Street. The tea room is at number 201, a short walk uphill from the sundial, with parking on the street and in the town lots behind the plaza. Allow 38 minutes from Old Town and 15 from Pinnacle Peak. Cave Creek is five minutes west for anyone who would rather have a beer.