Twelve new tea shop cities, from Tallinn to Bengaluru

This week's twelve cities come with the same guarantee as the rest of our tea shop pages: every price and pack size was read on the shop's own product page the day we wrote it, the addresses and opening hours are the ones the shops publish, and each page says which counter we would send a friend to first. Two of the cities are in countries that were not on the map before, Estonia and the United Kingdom, so the “Where to find it” box on every tea page now works for readers there too. Twenty-seven of the shops got a page of their own, with three picks from their shelf and one tea worth the trip.

Tallinn is the first Estonian city and the most complete page of the week, with six shops. Three of them sit inside the Old Town within a ten-minute walk: Chado at Uus 11, a Chinese and Japanese specialist where an organic English Breakfast is 5,00 € for 50 g and an Anxi Tieguanyin 19,00 €; the coffee-and-tea shop at Müürivahe 22, which has weighed loose leaf since the early 1990s and sells everything in 50 g packets, an Assam Satrupa among them at 3,90 €; and Kohvieri at Olevimägi 11, a family shop open seven days a week since 2007 where an English Breakfast is 3,50 €. Outside the walls, Morii in Kalamaja brews and sells the tea of one family farm in Kizugawa, Kyoto, with a ceremonial Uji matcha at 20,90 € for 30 g, and the Tea & Coffee Centre in the Viru Keskus mall prices every loose tea at a flat 5,00 € per 50 g.

The United Kingdom enters through Tower Hamlets, the London borough our readers live in rather than the one the famous tea houses are in. Katsute 100 at 147 Brick Lane is a Japanese tea room with a tatami room in the basement, and everything poured upstairs is sold in 50 g packets: an Uji Premium Gyokuro at 25,85 £ and a ceremonial matcha at 38,00 £ for 30 g. Yum Tea in Canary Wharf packages only matcha, a No. 1 ceremonial grade at 24,00 £ for a 50 g tin, and Taj Stores at 112 Brick Lane sells the everyday leaf of the neighborhood by the kilo, a Tata Agni at 9,49 £. Two online sellers, What-Cha and JING, cover the leaf nobody in the borough stocks. East London Tea Company, on Hackney Road, will be the first addition if its website comes back.

Bengaluru is our third Indian city. Sancha, the Delhi house that began as Aap Ki Pasand in 1981, has three shops here, on Lavelle Road and in the Phoenix malls in Hebbal and on Whitefield Road, and every visit starts with a free tasting served in china; a second-flush 2026 Darjeeling is 800 ₹ for 100 g. Infinitea, founded in the city in 2003 on Cunningham Road, sells everything in a single 100 g pack, from an Earl Grey at 150 ₹ to a Darjeeling Muscatel at 1.200 ₹. Teabox, shipping from Siliguri, fills in the estate Darjeeling lots that nobody in town stocks.

In the United States, most of the week went to the Midwest and the Great Lakes. Cincinnati keeps its tea in one block of Over-the-Rhine: Churchill's Fine Teas at Findlay Market, with more than 285 loose teas and an Earl Grey Classic at $4.55 the ounce; Colonel De, the spice merchant trading since 2005 whose chai is $3.00 the ounce; and Wendigo Tea, which names every tea after a cryptid and pours it at 1811 Elm Street. Columbus lost its best-known tea salons and is down to two counters, a spice stall in the North Market with a Lapsang Souchong at $11.00 for 2 oz and a reservation-only tearoom in Franklinton. Indianapolis has no tea district, so its three counters are far apart: Tea's Me, with a shop on the IU campus and one at Tarkington Park, where an English Breakfast is $10.00 the ounce; Nature's Tea in Pike Township, where half-ounce packets start at $3.95; and Recess, a matcha bar on East 17th Street that grinds to order. Milwaukee is Rishi's home town and still has no dedicated loose-leaf shop inside its limits, so its two counters are herb apothecaries, Tippecanoe in Bay View and HoneyBee Sage in Bronzeville, where an Assam is $3.25 and $4.11 the ounce. And Buffalo is published at the minimum: Snowy Owl, a blender inside the Niagara Frontier Food Terminal that opens to the public on Saturdays and prices every blend at $11.99 the ounce, and a plant-based market on Hertel Avenue with a tea bar. The downtown tea house on Pearl Street sits behind a bot challenge, so it is on the page as a place to visit, not a list to compare.

Washington, DC clusters around Dupont Circle. Teaism, founded in 1996, keeps its retail shop at 400 8th Street NW in Penn Quarter, where an organic Earl Grey is $10.50 for 2 oz and the ceremonial matcha, a 40 g tin from Marukyu Koyamaen, $38.00; Ching Ching Cha, a tea house and gallery that opened in Georgetown in 1998, moved after twenty-five years to 21st Street in Dupont, with a Dragon Well at $22.00 for 2 oz; Tea Mansion sells from 2 oz up on the same circle, an Earl Grey Gold at $12.60; and Valley Brook Tea, a Fujian grower's own counter inside a hotel on Embassy Row, sells a single sample bag at $3.50. McKinney, north of Dallas, has Fusion Teas, a family company since 2010 with a weekday showroom and a Dragonwell at $15.00 for 3 oz, and a spice-and-tea merchant off the old courthouse square where an organic Earl Grey is $6.99 the ounce. Mesa is a thin market and its page is short on purpose: a herb apothecary a block off Main Street that weighs tea by the ounce, an English Breakfast at $3.18, and an Asian grocery on Dobson Road with a Taiwanese tea aisle and an Alishan high-mountain oolong at $35.00 for 150 g. Tacoma has one real tea house, Mad Hat at 924 Broadway, with more than 300 teas and herbs sold in 50 g steps, a Yunnan Hong Cha at $9.00 and a Jin Jun Mei at $17.00; the second shop on the page is the Pacific Northwest Shop in Proctor, a gift store since 1978 whose tea shelf is the region's brands in sealed packs.

Sunday is also when we go back to a page we already have, and this week it was Zurich. All 38 prices at TEA & TEA on Froschaugasse and Shui Tang on Spiegelgasse were read again and none had moved; both shops are open at the same addresses and hours. Ten teas joined the list. TEA & TEA now stocks an organic English Breakfast at CHF 10.90 per 100 g, which it did not two weeks ago, and we added its Lung Ching, bancha, kukicha, Gyokuro Asahi, Yunnan Imperial, Milky Oolong and honeybush; from Shui Tang came a Zhengshan Xiaozhong from Wuyishan at CHF 36 for 100 g and a 2009 Yiwu pu-erh at CHF 22 for 50 g. Teelabor, the city's online-only seller, still publishes no catalogue we can read, so it stays off the list.

Every tea page now knows about these shops. Open English Breakfast and the page tells you where to find it near you, in Tallinn, Zurich or Cincinnati, at the price the shop published. If your city is not here yet, the teas by moment pages are a good place to start.

— The FindMeTea editorial team