New Tea Adventure NYC
Ive had to take my mother on a touristy NYC trip today(lived here two decades and just NOW she finally decides she wants me to show her around, lol). In any case, i rambled down to Chinatown and hit up TenRens Tea on a lark. Looks like they have a few spots in major cities, but i have not tried them out before. Nabbed a Lychee black tea, along with some standard Tie Kuan Yin(Tie Guan Yin) and some tins.
Prices werent miserable/werent amazing, but was nice to see a big tea spot where i was more used to the small hole in the wall places.(The kind where its more dried remedies, "diet" teas, etc.)
Anyone else have experience with them?
Posted Jul 29, 2017, 9:19 PM UTC
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Have you been to TeaDrunk, 123 E 7th St, btwn 1st and A?
And for a Japanese teahouse, Cha An is great, 230 E 9th St btwn 3rd and 2nd.
Ippodo has a shop too, and there are a couple gong fu places in Bkln and Queens I've heard mentioned- Orchid Tea House is the one I bookmarked.
You wouldn't happen to know other places in Brooklyn/Queens, would you? I'm kinda close to the area but far enough away that I might want to make a day trip out of multiple places.
Orchard is in Brooklyn
That guy is cool.
There's a placed called Fang in Flushing that looks legit and I think I remember someone mentioning.
Then there is the NYC branch of the Urasenke Tea School on the UES, that place is cool for a demonstration- there's a space on the top floor that is like an authentic countryside with a little teahouse in it.
There used to be a place called Tea Gallery around Houston St that was pretty serious, but I think they closed their brick and mortar, but the site is still active. There was also an excellent Ito En flagship on Madison Ave, that had like several hundred loose leaf options (not just Japanese), but the overhead was too high even for an Ito En.
It's hard to run a serious brick and mortar tea business in a place like NYC (or anywhere in USA, I guess). Rents are so high where there's traffic, so one has to be more like a restaurant and charge very high markups- but then serious tea people usually know where to source tea online without a very high markup.
I do second the places in my first response- Cha An has a cult following, reasonable prices, and good food options, and they've managed to survive for 14 years. Great atmosphere too. Check out all the photos in their yelp. And you can't get more authentic for matcha than Ippodo, their Kyoto store has been around for literally 300 years.