New this week: tea shops in 12 cities, from Zürich to Sydney

Some of the best conversations we have had about tea did not happen online. They happened at a counter, with a shopkeeper opening a tin so we could smell the leaf before deciding. This week we gave those places a home on FindMeTea: our favorite tea shops, city by city. There are twelve cities to start with, from Zürich to Sydney, and each page is the answer to the question a friend asks before a trip: where should I go for tea?

Take Zürich. In the old town, a few lanes apart, live two shops that could not be more different. TEA & TEA on Froschaugasse is the neighborhood counter, the kind of place you walk into for your Earl Grey and leave with a bag of loose chamomile you had not planned on. Shui Tang on Spiegelgasse is where you go to slow down: Chinese and Taiwanese teas sold by the 50 g, gaiwans and Yixing pots on the shelves, and a quiet that makes you want to brew properly when you get home. Twenty minutes down the line, Winterthur fits its whole tea scene on a single street, with a tearoom where you can sit while you make up your mind.

Montevideo, where we live, drinks mate first and tea second, which is exactly why its two tea boutiques are so devoted. Sinfonía in Carrasco is run by a tea sommelier and sells everything in 80 g tins; Reencontraté in Punta Carretas weighs out more than 400 teas from as little as 12 grams, so you can take a first-flush Darjeeling home without a leap of faith. Across the Andes, Santiago mixes a Providencia tea house open since 2007 with a chain of mall shops and, honestly, a supermarket aisle where Twinings sits beside the yerba.

New York keeps its two institutions a few blocks apart in lower Manhattan: Harney & Sons in SoHo, bright and modern, and McNulty's on Christopher Street, which has been weighing tea out of bins and jars since 1895 and still looks the part. Los Angeles has Chado, a tea room that started in a small room in 1990 and now pours in four salons. In Las Vegas the tea lives far from the Strip, in a Chinatown shop where the owner walks beginners through the leaves one by one. And Toronto has Tao Tea Leaf on Yonge Street, the place to taste a yellow tea or an aged sheng for the first time.

If you only visit one shop from this whole list, make it Tea Chapter in Singapore. Thirteen tea lovers opened it on Neil Road in 1989. You sit upstairs with a pot for as long as you like, then buy what you loved at the counter on the way out. It is the kind of shop these pages were made for. Down the road in Chinatown, ETTE numbers every tea in its catalogue like tracks on a record, and along Orchard Road the mall boutiques take care of the gift tins. Dubai runs from a merchant's shop in Al Barsha that has been blending tea for more than 25 years to counters out on the Palm.

In Sydney, The Tea Centre has been the dependable stop since 1993, from the CBD to Bondi Junction, with everything sold by the 50 g so that trying something new costs little. The Melbourne page sends you up into the hills on purpose: Tea Leaves in Olinda, in the Dandenong Ranges, has been blending since 1994 and keeps more than 300 teas on its shelves. Back in town, Oriental Teahouse in South Yarra is where to sit down with a Chinese tea.

Every page is short on purpose: the shops we would send a friend to, what to buy there, opening hours and a map link that works on any phone. And every tea in our catalogue now points you to a shop near you, so if you fall for an English Breakfast on a trip, its page tells you where to find it at home. If your city is not there yet, it will be soon. Until then, the teas by moment pages are a good place to start.

— The FindMeTea editorial team