The Tea Centre was founded in 1993 as a single Sydney store and, by the company's own account, was an early specialist in loose leaf in Australia. That first store is still trading: Shop 4 in Stockland Piccadilly, at 210 Pitt Street in the CBD, open since 1993. Three decades on the chain runs locations across Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT, with its head office and warehouse in Brisbane, and it is still Australian owned and operated.
The shelf is unusually flat: close to 150 loose teas and almost every one of them in the same 50 g bag, from an English Breakfast at A$ 9.45 to a gyokuro at A$ 42.45. Black tea takes up half the list, with a long run of breakfast blends and five Darjeelings; then come some two dozen greens, a score of herbals, eight chais, fruit tisanes, six oolongs — a Dung Ti and a Ti Kuan Yin among them — five rooibos, a pu-erh, a yerba mate and four whites. Only the matcha, in a 30 g tin, and the Australian native range, sold in tins, break the format.
The Sydney shops are not interchangeable. Piccadilly opens at eight in the morning for the office crowd and is the oldest in the group; Bondi Junction, opened in 2025 inside Westfield, added a blending bar where you build your own mix and a matcha-to-go station; Hornsby has been trading in its Westfield since 2006; and Warringah Mall in Brookvale covers the northern beaches. The same range ships Australia-wide from the online store.
Tea shops · Sydney, Australia