In Los Angeles, Tea at Shiloh describes itself as a “late night teahouse.” Here, visitors can reserve slots from 7 to 11 p.m. to sip unlimited amounts of tea — at this hour, all herbal, with blends made by each day’s staff — and sprawl out in nooks of plush cushions, in a warmly lit loft with tall ceilings and exposed brick, while jazz musicians play in a corner. “I was looking for soft spaces in the evening,” says founder Shiloh Enoki, who opened the eponymous teahouse in 2022.
Enoki previously worked in the music industry, and her experience with nightlife was often loud and centered on the more performative aspects of dating (“being perceived by guys,” she says). For her new venture, “All I wanted to do was drink tea, listen to jazz, be cozy, and still have the opportunity to meet strangers.” Tea felt like a conduit to an alternative space. While coffee shops tend to encourage a practice of grab and go, or of work or hustle culture, “that’s not the energy of tea,” according to Enoki. “Tea is like, I’m gonna sit here for hours and I’m gonna have a deep conversation with the person sitting across from me, and that’s so rare in our culture.”
Despite tea’s astounding popularity globally, the United States has long lagged behind many other countries when it comes to tea consumption, and that conception of tea has mostly been limited to iced black tea. This, however, appears to be changing, with the U.S. importing far more tea — in the hundreds of millions of dollars — this decade than it did 30 years ago, with millennials in particular the most likely to be tea drinkers. Matcha is, obviously, everywhere; according to the New Consumer, it usurped chai as the leading specialty tea drink in cafes. A lot more tea, it seems, is about to follow, as new tea-focused businesses sprout up across the country and as tea sees increased applications as a flavor element in food, desserts, and cocktails in addition to its consumption as a standalone drink.
Across the country, teahouses with a similar ethos to Enoki’s are catering to the desire for another kind of space: one that feels slower and more intentional than the average coffee shop, and which offers a different experience than yet another restaurant or high-end cocktail bar. In July, “tea salon” Han Cha opened in Chicago, serving a selection of nine teas from Chicago-based tea company Spirit in the format of British high tea. Over the course of the two-hour-long booking, guests might sip Taiwanese black tea with notes of quince and orange blossom alongside bites of English cheddar and Korean-style quick pickles, or Thai white tea with Japanese curry pimento cheese sandwiches.
Heiji Black, who partnered with artist Theaster Gates (in whose Stony Island Arts Bank building the concept is located) on the venture, is compelled by the way tea “makes people slow down and savor the experience.” She cites the teahouses she grew up going to in Korea, which were “really about being social and meeting with people and connecting with them,” as inspiration for Han Cha.
At Tea at Shiloh, Enoki also tries to emphasize being in the moment. While the cafe welcomes co-working, especially during the day, she says she wanted to design the experience at night such that people “don’t want to be on their laptop or their phone.” Rather than enforce a hard no-laptop policy, Tea at Shiloh offers other things for people to do with their hands, like games, clay, and watercolors. The dim lighting and communal seating also offer “subtle cues” that the space, at night, isn’t a place for being lost in a screen, she explains.
Even teahouses that don’t serve matcha, like Tea at Shiloh, cite its importance in the current teahouse moment. In May, the artist Juno Shen opened Soft Hours, a teahouse in Manhattan’s Chinatown. (A laptop-free space, it draws inspiration from the Song dynasty, which Shen describes as a “culturally rich era” in which scholars “built rituals around slowing down and shifting your attention.”) “Matcha and boba have done something really important in making tea culture relevant to a younger generation, and I think we’re reaching a point where people are asking, What else is there?” Shen says. At Soft Hours, there is no matcha whisked in front of you, poised for a TikTok video. Likewise, “we don’t do boba; we don’t do cold foam. We moved away from all the performance that a trendy tea place would have.”
Instead, Shen’s menu hews toward a selection of Chinese teas: streamlined but still showing range. There’s green tea fragrant with jasmine; two kinds of oolong, one oxidized in a way that gives it notes of plum and the other roasted over charcoal until it evokes toasted nuts; black tea with a honey-like body; and a deeply woodsy fermented pu’erh. Perhaps the main concession to trends is that every tea can be ordered as an iced latte as well, which Shen considers a way for people to “softly get introduced” to tea. “I’m not presenting something that’s extremely traditional, so I think I’m just the next step of [people] exploring a little bit more about tea,” Shen says. “I think the next stage of tea culture in America should move beyond individual ingredients becoming trendy [and into] the understanding of tea as this incredibly diverse seasonal category.”
Tian Tea House opened in Kansas City, Missouri, in late 2025. Matcha drinks are far and away the most popular, according to co-owner Saranya Hubbard. “I really don’t have to advertise anything that much — it already sells itself,” she says. But similarly to Shen, Hubbard, who grew up in Thailand surrounded by the tea culture in Bangkok’s Chinatown, sees her teahouse as an opportunity to showcase the wider variety of Asian tea culture. Tian brews and offers classes on Chinese gongfu tea and serves lesser-known Thai tea, including one made with hibiscus and bael (a fruit that’s sometimes called golden apple or stone apple). To make the most of the space, the teahouse turns into Moon, a cocktail bar, at night. Tea bridges the gap between the two concepts: There are highballs infused with tea and whisky drinks made with matcha.
Further proof of tea’s rising moment can be found in Heytea’s current expansion across the United States. The Chinese chain got global attention when it popularized cheese tea in the late 2010s, but it didn’t enter the U.S. market until 2023, when it opened its first store in NYC; now, it has more than 40 locations nationwide. With drinks like milk tea boba, fruit teas with inclusions, and black teas finished with fluffy toppings, the chain sits at the intersection of the growing cultural fixations on bubble tea, matcha, and highly customized specialty beverages of all kinds, including coffee and dirty soda. The chain describes itself as offering “new-style” tea, which senior PR manager Yinnan Shen explains to mean “experimenting a lot with what tea can become.” Some of its beverages, Shen says, take the approach of crafting a cocktail: What botanics can be added to the drink? What layers of texture and flavor? McDonald’s Sweet Tea this is not.
In June, Heytea also opened the first U.S. location of its Teabar offshoot. The concept — which serves dine-in only pots of tea as well as tea ice cream and elaborate beverages like jasmine milk tea topped with a “matcha cloud” — rapidly drew massive crowds. Unlike Heytea shops, which offer a more grab-and-go feel, Teabar was, like some of those independent teahouses, intended to be more of a place to slow down. Together, the interest in Teabar in addition to the original Heytea concept, represent what Shen calls tea’s “continued evolution.” “What Heytea is trying to do is find the most accurate contemporary interpretation of people’s needs around tea,” she says. That seems especially pertinent in the context of the U.S., where the tea culture is nascent compared to China.
Now, according to Nethra Rajendran, a beverage experience developer at Oatly, black tea, jasmine, and oolong are starting to “re-emerge in new formats,” particularly in mainstream chains. Instead of boba being the medium for these flavors, they’re increasingly popping up as part of the growing “refresher” category,” she explains.
Of course, the interest in tea is no longer limited to the teahouse or tea bar alone. “We can see a very real application of tea beyond a [drink] base in the 2025 resurgence of Earl Grey,” wrote Rajendran, noting the popularity of Earl Grey syrups and creamtops for use in matcha and coffee drinks. Tea is no longer a standalone drink, but, increasingly, a freeform flavor element. When NYC’s ambitious new soft serve shop Unnecessary opened this summer, it launched with a “not-so-plain vanilla,” enriched with osmanthus oolong. Oolong also appears as the grounding basenote of its watermelon-mint flavor, which it developed to be more refreshing than what people might expect from typical milk tea.
The argument has been made that we, as modern society, are on a hedonistic hunt for more flavors, our tastebuds “spoiled” by the glut of “maple-matcha-blackberry-thyme-yuzu-miso-caramel everything.” Every drink is involved in a way that only the early days of the Starbucks Frappuccino could have foretold; every dish is a referential mashup of a handful of other dishes or other cultural fascinations. Perhaps tea, with its global breadth barely tapped in the U.S., can provide further flavors to mine. Nearly every culture has a tea to explore, Rajendran adds: the osmanthus and oolong of East Asia, the masala chai and Assam teas of South Asia, the rooibos and kineliba of Africa, the hibiscus in the Caribbean and Latin America, the sweet tea of the American South.
Tea has been around for thousands of years, but perhaps we’ve yet to see how far it can continue to go. As Heytea’s Shen says, “Tea is a living culture, and living culture changes.”
from Eater https://ift.tt/J06Znlb
No comments: