Garden Tea Lounge sits inside Craftiques Mall at 2375 NW Military Highway, a vintage, collectibles and crafts mall with more than 200 dealer slots in the North Salado Village shopping center, just north of Lockhill Selma. The mall opened in November 2009 and calls itself the home of the lounge. Between the booths of china and teapots there is a room that serves organic loose-leaf tea by the cup, with scratch-made scones, cheese plates and pastries from local bakers, and it also takes bookings for private tea parties.
More than forty organic teas, herbal infusions and tisanes are sold by the ounce in vacuum-sealed bags, and the same list is on the online shop. The ladder starts low: the Earl Grey, built on a Yunnan Dian Hong with bergamot from southern Italy, is the cheapest black. Dragon Well from Zhejiang and Tie Guan Yin from Anxi County sit in the middle. Silver Needle buds from Fujian and a ceremonial matcha from Aichi prefecture are at the top, and ripe pu-erh comes pressed in small tuo cha of about five grams each.
The lounge also sells teaware from several tea cultures: teapots, tea makers, infusers, cups and mugs, maté gourds and bombillas, and matcha bowls, while the mall around it is full of vintage tea services. It keeps its own hours, shorter than the mall's: ten to five on Monday, Tuesday and Saturday, ten to eight from Wednesday to Friday, and noon to five on Sunday. It is the one shop on this page where you can taste a tea in the cup before taking a bag of it home.