James O.
Yelp
Its really hard to know where to begin.
There really wasn't anything positive I can say about this place. I think the concept was cool to combine a clothing design studio and tea shop, but the tea shop is a horrible representation of tea culture.
1.) The prices. This is inexcusable, especially considering the quality of the tea. When I am charged 20 bucks to drink one pu-erh, I don't want a pu-erh tea bag. This is shocking and would turn anyone off from ever trying it again. Their other teas were stale and way over-priced. For a place that is trying to pretend to know stuff about tea; I am shocked and appalled that they would think serving Pu-Erh tea in a tea bag is acceptable.
2.) The store front is very claustrophobic and is very difficult to tell how much things cost, or what is for sale. It took about 10 minutes for me to find the tea menu, and another 10 minutes to finally get my order placed.
3.) The worst part was the tea themselves. I love tea. I study tea. I have even worked on a tea estate. What this tea shop is doing is close to highway robbery. The quality of teas was mediocre at best (think Teavana), and were clearly bulk ordered from some wholesaler, and have since sat on the shelves getting stale and musty (not talking about the Pu-Erh here, as at least that can handle the aging!).
Pu-Erh tea is popular at the moment. And with a tea shop named Pu-Erh, you think they would know what they are doing, and are able to do it well. My advice would be to forget all the other teas they are trying to sell, and focus on just Pu-Erh. That would be a much more appropriate shop for their name, and it would be better to learn and focus on a single tea, than do a half-ass failure on everything.
As it stands, this tea shop is in my worst 5 tea shops I have ever been to. I honestly would have preferred to be in a Starbucks because at least then I wouldn't have to deal with pretentious nonsense.