Get ready for a storm in a teashop

Tea & Sympathy is where hip New Yorkers go to sample good, old traditional British fare: scones, bangers and mash - and verbal abuse. Lauren Mechling went to see why they're so eager to get a mouthful

There is a frightening sign tacked to the door of Tea & Sympathy. It reads as follows: "1) Be pleasant to the waitresses – remember, Tea & Sympathy girls are always right. 2) NO EXCEPTIONS: You will have to wait outside until your entire party is present. Latecomers will not be accepted.... 5) If we don't need the table you may stay all day, but if people are waiting and you have finished your meal, then it's time to naff off. These rules are strictly enforced. We have a Zero Tolerance for those who try to break them."

When people talk about Tea & Sympathy, they don't bother bringing up the restaurant's adorable teapot collection or delicious scones – they just want to swap stories about the English waitresses. It's hard to find a New Yorker who hasn't been verbally spanked by one of them, harder yet to find one who didn't enjoy it at least a little bit.

When my friend and I went recently, the weather was damp and windy enough to make Rule No 2 – the one about having to wait out on the sidewalk – seem less than sensible, but that didn't get in the way of us joining 20-odd would-be customers outside the tiny West Village tea shop. Nobody in the restaurant would take our names; it was up to the customers to determine who had been waiting the longest. It was tense. Next to me stood an angry woman in a chartreuse coat. "This is what I made a journey for!" she huffed to her friend.

"Don't be snotty," said Chartreuse's friend, hoping that the terrifying English lady who'd just appeared at the door hadn't picked up on Chartreuse's bad attitude. "I think we should change venues," groaned Chartreuse.

A man whose face was pressed to the window told his date, "We should just go."

"I'm not going now. Forget it. If we'd been waiting 20 minutes, maybe, but once you hit that 40-minute mark, there's no shifting."

She had a point. My friend and I stubbornly stayed put. Finally, we were brought to an empty table that was a no larger than a draughtboard. Our neighbours looked us up and down with relief. "Phew," said one of them, a man in a gold necklace. "I was afraid there were going to be three of you and we'd have to be sitting on each other's laps."

My friend and I were given four or five seconds to scan the menu. A thin waitress with short dark hair and bitten-down fingernails popped over. I asked for a pot of tea and a plate of bangers and mash. My friend just wanted a pot of tea.

"You have to have something to eat," she insisted. "There's an $8.50 minimum. If you don't order something, I'll have to charge you anyway."

"I'm not hungry," said my friend. "We'll pay the $17."

"Are you going to have dessert?"

"Later? I might do."

"You might?" She screwed up her face. "I can't be bothered to serve you. You're being rude."

The girl bounced away and conferred with her colleagues. The waitress who had been guarding the door came over to our table.

"We need your table," she said.

"Are you kicking us out?" I asked.

She nodded her head. "Sorry."

We should have been furious, but it was all too staged to incite real fury. "Off we go," said my friend.

Tea & Sympathy belongs to Nicky Perry, a feisty 42-year-old who calls herself the Tea Lady of New York. Perry has an astonishing amount of curly hair and one of those open and pretty faces that isn't well suited to the pugnacious expression that crosses it every now and again.

I met her in Carry On, the restaurant's take-out shop. We sat by the window in the front of the shop. Warren, a cute English boy wearing a sock cap, was unloading a box of PG Tips behind the counter.

Perry got her start at the age of 15 when she worked as a tea lady at the stock exchange in London. She ran around with a rock'n'roll crowd, and ended up joining Squeeze when they moved to New York. She was 21.

When Tea & Sympathy opened its doors in 1990, there was no need for any Rules. "Nobody came in but a few stragglers," said Perry. It wasn't until a review appeared in The New York Times in 1991 that people started streaming into the restaurant in droves. "A lot of fashion people. It was absolutely unbelievable. Albert Watson, Naomi Campbell, Amber Valetta... wall to wall."

Four years ago, the restaurant became such a zoo that Perry and her minions had to draft The Rules. "It got to a point where it was out of control," she said.

So Perry has had to train "her girls" to toughen up. "I've taught them that when people cross that line they can tear their throats out as far as I'm concerned. What we've discovered over the years is that if you're really sweet, people see it as a weakness. But if you're like that about it..." she pounded her fist into her palm, making a loud smack, "people get it."

Perry estimated that customers have to be thrown out twice a week. Just the other night, a man had the nerve to come into the restaurant and try to sit at a table of friends who had already eaten. He was forced to sit at his own table, and ended up complaining about the waitresses to the other customers. He was asked to leave.

"And he left?" I asked.

"Of course." Perry didn't seem surprised. "They have to leave."

There's no getting around The Rules. If you really can't cope with them, the only solution is to go whole hog and boycott the restaurant. The writer Jennifer Belle used to go to Tea & Sympathy four or five times a week, and has since sworn off the establishment. There is a scene in her novel High Maintenance in which a waitress asks a table to move, provoking an old lady to stalk off in outrage and a little girl to cry.

"That really happened," says Belle, who stopped going to the restaurant when the waitresses wouldn't allow her friend, who walked into the restaurant just as she was about to order, to join her. "He had to sit all the way across the restaurant, and we had to talk across the whole restaurant as if we were at the same table."

As our conversation wound down, Perry returned to my bangers-and- mash incident. She offered me a plate on the house. As delicious as it sounded, I had to say, "That's OK." She looked sad. "No worries," I said. My tummy was grumbling, but I would just grab a bagel down the block. It wasn't worth running into the girls who'd booted me out.

Tea & Sympathy, 112 Greenwich Avenue, New York (212) 691 2713