Are restaurants serving good loose leaf tea?

I haven’t been impressed with the tea selection at most restaurants and cafes. The ones that try to do tea basically give you a cup of hot water and your selection of a commercial bagged tea like Stash and Twinings. Even at Asian restaurants tea often equals hot water and cheap bagged tea.

I’ve gone to a few coffee shops where they use better quality tea and brew it fresh, but these places are the exception not the norm.

I think tea culture has to ways to go before it catches up to coffee, at least in North America. Perhaps then restaurants will take tea seriously.

I’ve come across a few. I feel that a restaurant that intends to offer you a real dining experience really needs to have loose leaf tea – it’s an attention to detail thing.

It’s mostly been fancier restaurants that offer loose leaf teas I’ve found, though I’ve come across a couple of surprises. Salsbury House here, whick is a pretty casual diner type place serves Rishi tea (and does a better job serving it that most places), and Pancake House also has a selection of Cornelia Bean teas.

Segovia, which is local to me and probably one of the best tapas places in North America, has a selection of loose teas on their menu, with descriptions of each. Most other places don’t have a printed menu in my experience.

Sadly, even fancy restaurants that offer loose leaf tea rarely do a good job of steeping it. Water of questionable temperature, no indication of how long it’s been steeping or how long it should steep when it arrives at your table, and pots or steepers that don’t allow you to remove the leaf from the remaining tea once you’ve poured your cup.

I usually just skip tea in restaurants, and have a cup when I get home.

Table 52 in Chicago serves Tea Gschwendner.

I managed a full-service 24-hour truck stop & restaurant for about four years. I can tell you that most restaurants view tea and beverages as an opportunity to make up for slim margins on food items. I tried to offer quality teas in our restaurant (and it was a brand new $4 million facility with a nice family dining restaurant, despite the fact that it was a truck stop) and was pretty much laughed at by my vendors. The closest I could even get with the mainline vendors was when one of the reps told me his tea was “real orange pekoe” which from the way he said it I just knew he had no idea what that meant.

Sadly, as someone who now manufactures amazing organic iced teas, I would love to get in to the restaurant market, but the game is rigged. Big outfits like Cain’s go into these restaurants before they even open and offer to provide coffee and tea brewing equipment as long as they buy their tea and coffee. I can’t afford to compete with that.

I feel like this might be slowly turning, as tea as a trend seems to be slowly in general (I’ve had a bunch of friends this year for the first time come to me like “so, tea…I switched recently and wow, you were so right, I shoulda paid attention when you were way into it a couple years ago!”). I’ve been to some nice middle-ground hippish spots while traveling in the past year or so, the kind with a craft cocktail and beer menu and whatnot (to give a sense of what sort of spot I’m talking about) where they offered better quality tea from a regional/local vendor (examples include Steven Smith in the Pacific Northwest, a super local loose leaf supplier in NOLA whose tea, which was in a cheesecloth-like hand-tied sack in the pot, was amazing, and Harney in the Northeast) than I would’ve expected 10 years ago when if there was anything offered at all it’d probably have been Lipton-grade. And a local noodle bar where I live just opened and they serve proper fresh loose leaf green tea in tetsubins, which is great. So it might be changing for the better. Maybe. Small steps.

I manage a restaurant and I really wish we had better. It’s an American breakfast joint, so coffee is king. Since I have taken over though, we have stopped serving the CTC Orange Pekoe by some nameless company to serving a local company’s teas. Granted, it’s all bagged, but it is muslin sachets with decent size leaves inside. (the company is called Two Leaves. Formerly Two Leaves and a Bud.) We do only have one temperature of water, and that is HOT AS SATAN’S BREATH. I typically let my customers do all the preparation as well, seeing as however they make that cup of tea is none of my business.

Funny thing, the 4-shot-wet-cappuccino-5-times-a-day owner was glad to make the switch to the next step up in tea. He says it’s because “That orange shit didn’t have any orange flavor in it!”

I notice vegan restaurants offer great loose tea selections with some frequency here in LA! A friend of mine runs a place called Sun Cafe and they serve Art of Tea, which is also a local company.

I have yet to be to a place that had good tea (not counting dedicated tea houses/ coffee or tea cafe types). Usually it is either the tea is poor quality or due to liability reasons the water isn’t that hot so the tea is steeped badly.
I’ve been to some fine dining places and they served tetley/biglow. Maybe mighty leaf or tazo.

As per this article, chefs lean towards generic teas http://lifehacker.com/the-generic-foods-and-ingredients-professional-chefs-ch-1612252330

I’ve been to a few restaurants that serve good loose leaf tea, but it’s rarely something that’s actually on the menu. Fancy Chinese restaurants tend to do this, places like Hong Kong Lounge (I&II) in San Francisco. You have to know what you want to ask for it though, so if you just ask for ‘hot tea’, they’ll just serve you whatever tea bag they like, but it’s the same price for tea per head. (IMO though, that particular restaurant gets alot of hype, they serve good tea, but average to below average food for the price.)

Some other restaurants in SF have tea on the menu too, but it tends to be in tea bags, nice teabags like Harney &Sons, and Art of Tea, but teabags nonetheless, and they just stick it in a cup of hot water for you. On the other hand, the tea/dessert house trend has been on the rise in the area lately, and they serve OK loose leaf.

A fascinating experience I had last summer was that some restaurants will come out with tiny teapots with hot water and a basket of tea bags for you to choose from. The tea bags were average supermarket stuff, but being able to control the temperature of your water and your steeping time is at least something!

Good loose leaf? Oh my lands, no! Around here bagged iced tea is what is offered. Even that they don’t do well. I feel lucky to get a glass that isn’t cloudy and sour. Very few even offer hot tea and the ones that do, serve it so poorly it is just sad. Our local Denny’s serves hot tea that tastes like fish. How do you even make a Lipton tea bag taste like fish? Starbucks uses fancy sachets but they don’t ‘get’ tea and steep it too long and too hot for me and serve it in paper cups.

So when I brag on our local Steak N Shake for making a flavorful cup of tea from a bag, it is an extreme rarity. More so is the server who actually tries to make it the best it can possibly be made from a bag. Standard paper bags will never match the complexity of loose leaf but it can be enjoyable if some effort is put into it.