Tea shops
Our favorite tea shops, city by city
Places we'd recommend to a friend: we visited their catalogue, read their prices and keep re-checking them. No shop pays to appear here.
Uruguay
UruguayUnited States
United StatesNew York
2 tea shops→
New York's two tea institutions sit a few blocks apart in lower Manhattan and could not be more different. In SoHo, a family tea company sells its tins in a bright modern shop; in Greenwich Village, a corner store that has been weighing out tea since 1895 still does it from bins and jars. Both ship across the country, so what you taste in the shop is easy to reorder.
Chicago
2 tea shops→
Chicago's loose-leaf shopping lives in two neighbourhoods. In the Gold Coast, two blocks from Michigan Avenue, a shop run by a tea sommelier keeps more than 200 pure teas sold by the 100 g; up north in Andersonville, a tea bar with open-mic nights sells its leaf in 2 oz pouches. Both ship nationwide, and two Chicago-based online sellers without a public storefront cover the rarer Chinese teas.
Los Angeles
1 tea shop→
Los Angeles is a city of tea rooms rather than tea counters, and its longest-running one grew from a small room near La Cienega in 1990 into four salons across the metro area. The Little Tokyo salon downtown is the one to start with: a long list of Chinese, Indian and Japanese teas by the 4 oz, with a pot to drink while you decide.
Las Vegas
1 tea shop→
Away from the Strip, the tea in Las Vegas is on Spring Mountain Road, the city's Chinatown. Its specialist shop leans Chinese and Taiwanese, with roasted and milk oolongs, a sticky-rice shou pu-erh and Japanese matcha sold in small 1–2 oz pouches, and it doubles as a tasting room where the owner walks beginners through the leaves.
Canada
CanadaChile
ChileAustralia
AustraliaSydney
1 tea shop→
Sydney's loose-leaf standby is a chain rather than a single boutique: The Tea Centre, trading since 1993, has shops at Stockland Piccadilly in the CBD, Westfield Bondi Junction and Westfield Hornsby, with more along the East Coast. Everything is sold by the 50 g at prices that make trying a new type easy, from an A$ 9.45 English Breakfast to Silver Needles, Ti Kuan Yin and four kinds of chai.
Melbourne
1 tea shop→
The one Melbourne-area shop we could price is not in the city at all: Tea Leaves is in Olinda, up in the Dandenong Ranges, where a business that has sourced and blended tea since 1994 keeps more than 300 teas on the shelves and sells them by the 100 g bag. If you are staying in town, Oriental Teahouse in South Yarra and on Little Collins Street pours and sells Chinese teas, but publishes no prices online.
Singapore
SingaporeUnited Arab Emirates
United Arab EmiratesSwitzerland
SwitzerlandZurich
2 tea shops→
Zürich's specialist tea shops are tucked into the lanes of the Altstadt. One is a loose-leaf counter in the Niederdorf with everyday blacks, greens, herbs and rooibos by the 50 or 100 g; the other, a few streets away on Spiegelgasse, is devoted to Chinese and Taiwanese teas sold mostly by the 50 g, with the teaware to brew them. Both also sell online.
Winterthur
2 tea shops→
Winterthur's tea shopping fits on a single street: two specialist shops sit a few doors apart on Steinberggasse in the Altstadt, one a loose-leaf counter founded in 1994, the other a tea shop with its own tearoom. Between them they cover Chinese and Japanese pure teas, Taiwanese oolongs, herbs by the 30 g and yerba mate, and both also sell online.
India
IndiaMumbai
3 tea shops→
Mumbai drinks chai by the cutting glass, but its loose-leaf shopping is easy to map. A Delhi-born tea boutique keeps three shops in the city, from Kala Ghoda to a mall in Lower Parel; a Mumbai brand founded in 2010 sells its teas from counters inside gourmet supermarkets; and the chai café chains pack their masala blends to take home. Everything below ships across India, so what you taste in the shop is easy to reorder.
Delhi
4 tea shops→
Delhi is where India's tea boutiques began, and the capital still has the densest choice in the country. A family merchant in Sunder Nagar Market sells Darjeeling and Assam by the 50 g at prices that make trying a new estate easy; the tea house that opened in Old Delhi in 1981 now has boutiques in Saket and Chanakyapuri as well; a direct-from-garden brand runs its only shop in Khan Market; and a Siliguri company keeps a counter in Greater Kailash. All four also ship nationwide.
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