Spice & Tea Merchants of Grand Rapids

Spice & Tea Merchants was founded in 2003 by Lisa Freeman in Saugatuck, on the Lake Michigan shore, and has grown into a franchise of fifteen stores, seven of them in Michigan. The Grand Rapids store describes itself as front and centre in the Downtown Market at 435 Ionia Avenue SW, the food hall whose other stalls are a butcher, a cheesemonger and a patisserie, and it keeps market hours: 11am to 8pm on weekdays and 10am to 8pm on Saturday and Sunday.

Herbs, spices, hand-blended seasonings, sea salts, sugars and extracts share the stall with almost 200 loose teas sold in 1, 4 and 8 oz bags, alongside teaware. The 1 oz bag is the unit, and most of the list sits at US$ 6.99: Irish Breakfast, an organic Earl Grey, a Darjeeling from the Sungma estate, an organic Lapsang Souchong, Sencha, an organic Jasmine, a Formosa Oolong, a Jade Oolong in the Tung Ting style and a White Peony. Above that line are Assam Bukhial at US$ 7.99, Dragonwell at US$ 8.99 and a 1 oz bag of matcha at US$ 9.99.

The chain's webstore ships within the United States only, charges by weight, and does not hold online orders for pickup, so the stall is reached in person or by calling it directly; the site also warns that some online products are not stocked in every store and vice versa. In a city where the other two loose-leaf rooms close by six, a tea counter inside a market that stays open until eight is a practical thing to know.