This piece was originally published on World Tea News, and you can find the full feature here.
Teaism owners Linda Neumann and Michelle Brown opened their first teahouse-restaurant in Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. in 1996 with the goal of making exquisite loose-leaf tea accessible to all. They say this was in a “time and place where tea was conceived as either a dark powder in a bag with a string – to be sweetened heavily and discarded – or a stuffy afternoon affair with china and linens.”
“We wanted to highlight the beautiful diversity of the camellia sinensis plant itself,” the owners say on their website. “We wanted our guests to be enrolled in their choice to drink tea and have a relationship to the leaf.”
Today – some 25 years later – Teaism has three restaurant-teahouse locations and a small tea retail shop in the Washington, D.C. area.
To accompany the teas at their restaurant-teahouses – and to highlight the cuisines of countries where teas are grown – Teaism serves curries, bento boxes and other healthy Asian-inspired meals. Their offerings are all prepared in a rustic, fast-casual setting, which they’ve been doing for many years before “fast casual” became a dining term. Of course, their tea menu is extensive and detailed, including “tea tips” and info on brewing times, etc. They offer black, green, oolong and white teas, in addition to herbal tisanes and a matcha sweet green tea.
World Tea News chats with Teaism co-owner, Michelle Brown and her daughter, Lela Singh. Singh has been assisting the Teaism business since she was 19, and she currently manages the brand’s retail and social media operations.
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Thanks for your time! First off, how did the idea for Teaism come about? What was the original vision?
Michelle Brown: Everyone knows they say, “location, location, location.” So, in 1995, when Linda and I began searching for a space to open our own business, that became our first priority. Concept was second. As restaurant professionals, we wanted to be flexible and adapt to the needs of the community. But when our real estate broker took us to see a historic building on R street, in Dupont Circle, we fell in love instantly. The space was 1,400 sq feet on two floors, it was a century old, with high ceilings, beautiful windows, and it was funky. It had been an art gallery previously, and 1,400 square feet was too small to be a full-service restaurant. The space was begging to be a teahouse.
I should mention, it was next door to a Starbucks. A great contrast. Only then did we begin to fully develop our business plan. I had life exposure to tea, but the location told us we needed to open a tea house right there. We started by editing out what we didn’t want to do. The first thing we understood was that we wanted to make pure loose-leaf tea accessible for daily enjoyment – no blends, no scented tea. The second thing was that we did not want to be another stuffy European-style tearoom. Asian-inspired accompaniments seemed the best way to instill the notion that tea largely comes from Asia. The third was that we didn’t want our new business to be an expression of our limitations. We gathered designers, and bakers, and friends and family to help develop who we would become. To this day, 25 years later, their contributions are deeply intertwined in who we are, and are a constant source of pride for us.
What makes Teaism unique?
Brown: Tea makes Teaism unique. In the beginning, we were sometimes criticized for not meeting expectations. “I didn’t like it, it’s not what I expected.” While some guests had preconceived ideas of what a tea house should be, others had no experience of ever visiting a tea-centric business. Why would they? Some may have been looking for finger sandwiches and silver tea pots, white linen and servers. We were anything but that – casual, Asian inspired, curries and bento box meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner.
We were a fast-casual long before that phrase had been coined. You have to help yourself here. We always engaged our guests in their service; our hope was that it would bring a doingness to tea making at home. We believed, and still do, that you have to participate in having a good cup of tea. We think it has all come together as intended.
What kind of reception has your restaurant-teahouse locations received from customers?
Brown: Not everyone is going to love us, and we know that. We don’t serve coffee. We boil large batches of our masala chai on the stove in the traditional style, so we don’t offer milk alternatives for the chai. Sometimes we change menu items and people are disappointed when their personal favorite dish is gone. But mostly people are very supportive. Some of our guests will come just for our French toast, others for only chicken curry and others for just beverages. They appreciate having somewhere to go that is locally owned, where they can get something quick, wholesome, healthy and reasonably priced, or just to enjoy a good pot of tea. They can dive deep if they want to, or they can have a simple cold beverage. We see people appreciate having options, and we try to be a solid resource for them.
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Have you seen more consumers turn to tea, learn about tea, and purchase loose-leaf tea during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Lela Singh: Absolutely. We closed our restaurant locations indefinitely in March of 2020, and it was a big push to get them all back up and running during this last year. But in the meantime, our retail tea shop kept shipping tea, and we had a lot more online mail orders than we were equipped to handle… We noticed a lot more orders for matcha or tisanes with turmeric, ginger, elderberry and hibiscus – so clearly immunity boosting is at the forefront of a lot of minds right now. But also, we’ve seen a lot of people turning to tea for a grounding ritual, or after they realized they were maybe ingesting too much alcohol at home.
Do you train your staff to educate customers about tea? What specifically do you do to educate customers about tea at your restaurant-teahouses and retail tea shop?
Singh: Figuring out what information is most important for staff training is something I think a lot of places must grapple with. We require our team to complete the Adagio tea training program online. We feel that is a good resource, so that our team can answer most basic questions from there… As for educating customers, we try to meet everyone where they are and be up front about our philosophy.
At your restaurant-teahouse locations, does your staff make recommendations to customers on the best tea or teas for each dish?
Singh: Within reason, but not aggressively. Some customers are just looking for a meal and say “I just want an iced tea” because they are accustomed to iced Lipton. We do make recommendations based on what customers are looking for, or their likes and dislikes, but we don’t insist on pairings. Pre-pandemic, there were periods of the day when cashiers were faced with lines of guests waiting to order. So, laboring over a tea selection is not always an option. If we get tea on an order, then we feel successful and confident the guest will enjoy it.
You do something interesting with your menu, where you have menu items developed to utilize product often wasted in restaurants. What can you tell us about that?
Singh: Over the years, we’ve tried (with mixed success) to do things with our dishes and our food sourcing that forces people to think… The focus on food waste came about after [Brown] read a fantastic book by chef Dan Barber called The Third Plate, which is about the future of food and the environment. She decided she wanted to put something on the menu that would get customers thinking about food waste in their lives and what foods might be creatively salvaged…
As for reusing tea – that has been on my mind!... When customers buy Gyokuro, I encourage them to eat those leaves at home after brewing. I know this is done in Japan sometimes with some sesame oil and soy sauce and it’s delicious.
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What will it take for restaurants to really recognize tea in a big way?
Singh: We are lucky to have a number of excellent D.C.-area restaurants, Michelin-starred chefs and mom and pop cafes using our tea for their tea service. But I notice that a lot of restaurant managers are wedded to using teabags because they think that will make their service faster and more foolproof with portioning. And a lot of restaurant managers are wedded to ordering products through a minimal number of distributors – which is certainly understandable because anyone working in the food/hospitality industry knows how difficult it is to juggle a long list of vendors. So, the businesses that work with us tend to be local and independent like us…
Also, we are in a good position to talk to restaurants about the various aspects of tea service – rotation, freshness, portioning, equipment needs, will the servers really have access to temperature control when they are slammed, or would you rather build your line with great teas that don’t need the water to be tempered? They need simplicity and frankly, so do we.
Bigger picture – why are we not seeing more restaurants featuring tea or specialty tea in a more prominent or innovative way, like what you’ve done with the menu at Teaism?
Brown: There is no “industry standard” for loose-leaf tea service in the restaurant community. But there are a lot of preconceived notions of what “tea service” should be. We are restaurants as well as a teahouse, so we have observed this barrier for the past 25 years.
Impediments in the restaurants begin with too many little service pieces: a pot, a lid, a strainer, a cup, sometimes a saucer, sugar, milk… the space, and speedy accessibility required in tight service areas for three to five different teas.... educating staff, for certain concepts it can be too precious an endeavor.
You have to consider that the factors are industry-wide. Restaurant tableware manufacturers are resistant to producing durable teapots designed for loose leaf brewing. When we go to Restaurant Shows, I always talk to the china manufacturers to suggest they get on board with loose leaf tea service, instead of making teapots designed for teabags. But they probably don’t hear that from anyone else.
Then there’s the question of institutional knowledge at any given restaurant – that is a problem that is universal to any business. When restaurant managers turn over, the next manager might not have a clear list of vendors to work from, so once the good tea runs out, they might just switch to teabags from a distributor they prefer to work with. As Lela says, we have to meet them where they are. If they just want to fit a strainer to a coffee mug, and call that tea service, we will help them do that.
And then, the tea world itself can confound things. If you run a restaurant that doesn’t specialize in teas, and one vendor is trying to tell you how great this special blend is, and the next is talking about pure leaf from single estates, and then the next one is telling you anything blended into a powder is matcha – blue matcha, roasted matcha, black matcha, white matcha, how are you going to make decisions without really researching? If you’re a high-end chef, you might have tea boards from different countries trying to court you and get you to sample exclusive teas from those countries. Great, but where is the chef going to source from, direct from the producer and in large quantities for just one menu item that their guests may or may not order for a nightcap? Their time to research and make decisions is severely limited. Tea loving consumers bemoan that there aren’t enough restaurants that serve good tea, but the logistical impediments are real.
To learn more about Teaism, visit Teaism.com.
This piece was originally published on worldteanews.com and has been edited for length and clarity. You can find the full interview here.