Tea's Me Cafe

The cafe sells tea the way a spice shop sells pepper: by weight, starting at a single ounce and climbing through two ounces, four ounces in a bag, four ounces in a tin, half a pound and a full pound. That bottom rung is the point. Most American shops make you buy a two-ounce tin before you know whether you like the tea; here an ounce of English Breakfast costs the same as a sandwich, and the shelf is wide enough that a first visit can be six small bags instead of one big one.

There are two shops and they behave differently. The one inside the IU Indianapolis Campus Center on University Boulevard keeps university hours, opening early and closing at seven on weeknights, shut at weekends. The Tarkington Park shop on North Illinois Street, which the cafe says opened in 2021, is the neighbourhood one, open weekday mornings into the afternoon. Both do more than tea: cafe drinks and tea lattes, bottled tea, grab-and-go breakfast and lunch, catering, space rental and delivery through DoorDash and Uber Eats.

The list is short and deliberate rather than encyclopedic. Two plain blacks, an English Breakfast and an Assam, sit at ten dollars the ounce. The two greens cost two dollars more and are the ones to spend on: a Lung Ching, the pan-fired Dragon Well, and a Japanese Sencha. The jasmine is the odd one out and the most interesting — the shop describes it as a Fujian oolong rather than a green, which is the older way of scenting it. A Masala Chai rounds it out. The site says the business was bought in 2017 by Tamika Catchings, after a career with the Indiana Fever, and describes itself as Black-owned.