Chapter Book & Tea Shop.

Chapter is a family affair with its roots in the Mt Eden tea shop that had operated at 442 Mt Eden Rd since 1995. The mix of tea and books started ten years later: with cousin Christina's help, Chapter was born in 2005 and the shelves widened to romance fiction alongside the tea. The current owner, Frances, describes the move as a career change made to fix a problem she kept running into, and the shop now stocks around 300 specialty teas and some 2,500 books, most of them romance.

Most of the tea is weighed up to order, and the shop names its suppliers on the site: Metropolitan Tea, Harney & Sons and Tea Total as the main ones, then T Leaf T, Coffee and Tea Lovers, KeriKeri Organic, Zealong, Oku, Pukka and Lezzo. That is why one page can hold an English Breakfast at NZ$ 16 the 100 g, a Darjeeling Margaret's Hope at NZ$ 22, a Bai Mu Tan at NZ$ 25, and by the 50 g an organic Wuyi rock oolong at NZ$ 27 and a Japanese gyokuro at NZ$ 25. There is a café counter too, with sweet and savoury snacks and Atomic coffee.

The shop opens Tuesday to Sunday from 10 to 4 and stays closed on Mondays except in December, with a summer break from Christmas Day until mid-January during which web orders are still processed. It hosts the monthly Auckland Romance Readers book club and sponsors Romance Writers of New Zealand. It is also the only Auckland shop on our list that explains how to arrive: Mt Eden Rd has clearway hours in the morning and late afternoon, there is a public car park on Essex Rd, and after-hours orders can be collected from the fruit shop three doors along.