Best tea company in America. My personal favorite and I see no reason to order from any other company except for teas they either never had or chose to discontinue.
So, I have had them ship me tea, lots of tea over the last 4 yrs. Found them on the ‘net and their website is better than many because it’s a very simple store front that’s well crafted with beautiful pictures and good descriptions…a shopping cart that works. We take that for granted sometimes with amazon, but regular shop owners muck that up still in 2011. There’s no social aspects to the site, no forums, etc. Maybe doesn’t need it because now there’s steepster!
At any rate, the tea quality is unmatched. I’m a big fan of formosa oolongs and theirs are fantastic. The customer service is awesome- i requested they give me extra labels to put on my bottles and they did it for me. Also requested recommendations and got a very detailed answer. Can’t ask for anything more!
This is a fun boutique tea shop with a variety of teas. This is kind of a goofy thing to say but they impressed me with their attention to detail by having an array of 3 zojirushi hot water machines behind the counter that regulated filtered water at three different temperatures. Imagine that? A tea shop that actually knows how to make perfect tea by brewing at the correct temperature! (I’ve seen tea shops that use a food service BUNN hot water dispenser that just makes boiling)
The tea is nothing to write home about . But the atmosphere can be a fun adventure for groups or a nice place to take a romantic date.
This pitiful store..it was actually a complete and total waste of my time. Not much variety. Bad service. Annoying loud music and instruction in Mandarin in the background.
The store itself was a vast expanse of mostly nothing but sparse and useless gift trinket items no real connoisseur would actually use for tea preparation and a modest variety of really overpriced tea that seemed to be of average quality.
Regarding the service. Shop employee corrected me without listening to what I was saying until we had an almost comedy of errors communicating (only it wasn’t funny at the time); insulted me when i asked about tea bags (clearly doesn’t know about nylon self fillable bags)- I felt she was arrogant and unpleasant. This attitude was verified by my companion because I thought maybe I was having a charlie sheen moment in that store.
So this young girl continued to follow me around cautiously and ‘corrected’ every jar I touched, making me feel judged and very unwelcome. I wanted to not buy anything and get the hell out of the store. So I did!
Listen, if you want to be a ‘curator’ of your teas, call it a ‘tea museum’, you-super-snotty-Chinese-national-teen-daughter-of-store proprieter.
wow! did not like!
B) Other reviewers on yelp and google maps claim tea shop is good. I really doubt these people have even tried Whole food’s iron goddess of mercy (tiquanyin), which-when very fresh- is a very good staple at 1/10 of the prices here for an equivalent. Now want good tea? Mail order from Red Blossom in SF.
C) As stated, the markup on the teas is outrageous. Pu’erh cake prices seemed reasonable though, but I couldn’t comment on the quality— they were inaccessible, non=interactive figurines at the top of the shelf out of reach.
D) This is the apple store of teas, only they only sell copies of windows and still have an apple employee attitude. Oh and you can’t touch the copies they are not for you to be touching them.- thank you!
