Harney & Sons

Harney & Sons was founded in 1983 by John Harney in Salisbury, Connecticut, packing tea into tins in the family basement. He had learned the trade at the White Hart Inn from a retired British tea man, Stanley Mason, and started with six teas Mason helped him source: Earl Grey, English Breakfast, Darjeeling, Formosa Oolong, Gunpowder and Irish Breakfast. The "& Sons" was aspirational — neither son was in the business yet.

The SoHo shop opened in 2010, just off the neighbourhood's shopping streets, and the tea it sells is still blended and packed by the family in Millerton, in upstate New York, where the leaf is tasted three times: on arrival, after blending and after packaging. The room in SoHo is small, with dark pink walls, and it has no kitchen of its own — the scones are baked on site, but the afternoon-tea service they first tried was dropped because the city vendors could not hold the quality.

What the shop is really for is the tasting bar. On weekdays two teas of the moment rotate every hour; on weekends it is a themed trio. The samples are free, and you can ask for another one, which makes this the rare place where a thirty-dollar tin can be tried before it is bought. The menu lists more than 250 loose teas available to drink there, by the cup or the pot, plus flights of four teas by theme and matcha whisked to order by named Japanese cultivar.