The Tao of tea

For many of us, tea is simply a bag and boiling water. Or it’s the tepid brew that arrives at some strip-mall Asian restaurants. Or it’s what out-of-town relatives do in fussy hotel salons in the afternoon.

In fact, while the coffee generation has been building a triple-shot espresso buzz, tea entrepreneurs across Los Angeles have been quietly creating a modern tea aesthetic. They have given tea a hipper, multicultural image that’s less rooted in stuffy British tradition and more attuned to contemporary urban life. They’ve given Asian teahouses multi-generational appeal and fused a fast-food nation attitude with a pause-awhile tea culture. Tea is now part of a lifestyle that includes organic food, yoga and gourmet yearnings.

Tea also helps satisfy America’s appetite for luxury, says Alfred Ritter, who has developed Zen Zoo, a modernized Taiwanese teahouse in Brentwood. “On a per cup basis, even the most expensive tea is an affordable luxury.”

Across the nation, the number of tea salons has grown from about 200 in 1990 to nearly 1,500 today, says Joseph Simrany, president of the Tea Council, a New York-based trade group.

The boost has come on the trail of research that suggests that tea’s high concentration of polyphenols, compounds with strong antioxidant properties, may help protect against some types of cancer. And as many people look for alternatives to coffee, they’ve discovered high-quality teas that rival coffee for aroma and flavor.

Many of the new tea emporiums in L.A. promote tea with artisanal blends, tastings and a fair dose of exotica. (Where else could you get a cup of tea and a foot massage, or sample spiced duck tongues with Chinese chrysanthemum tea, or perch on a designer barstool while sipping a blend of tea, orange blossoms, red fruits and roses?)

A quick lesson for those who aren’t already steeped in tea culture: All true teas come from the leaves of the evergreen camellia sinensis shrub. Black tea is fermented; green is steamed and dried but not fermented; oolong is partially fermented; and white is slightly processed. Herbal tea isn’t technically tea, but an infusion of herbs, seeds, spices or even flower petals.

No matter the type, “tea” remains a kind of code word that across cultures always seems to translate into, “Let’s sit and relax.” And there are dozens of ways to do just that around town.

Tea and luxury

“You’re interrupting my tea time,” Jane Matsumoto gently chides the caller on her cellphone as she pulls up to the elegant tea bar at Le Palais des Thes in Beverly Hills.

Tea is a daily ritual for Matsumoto, even at work as a project manager at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. As store owner Randy Arnold brews The des Alizes for her, Matsumoto inhales the green tea’s notes of watermelon and kiwi.

“I love the nose,” Matsumoto says, borrowing a term commonly used with wine.

Indeed, “We’re like a wine shop for tea,” says Arnold’s business partner, art gallery owner David Barenholtz.

Le Palais des Thes is easily the city’s most luxurious tea emporium. It’s not just the clean lines, fresh flowers and spare, neat graphics that set it apart. It’s a philosophy of art and beauty that Arnold calls “tea-ism.”

Tea in his year-old salon is smelled in apothecary jars, tasted at his tea bar, discussed at regular tea classes and celebrated with tea utensils, books and 250 tins of tea, arranged geographically along the floor-to-ceiling shelves. Though 100 grams of their loose-leaf teas sells for an average of $8 to $14, some rare types, such as the vivid green Gyokuro Hikari, cost up to $115.

The shop is the only North American branch of the French chain, but the partners are planning eight to 10 more shops, beginning this year in New York or San Francisco.

At the eastern edge of Beverly Hills, Sona pastry chef Michelle Myers recently opened Boule, her version of a Parisian tea salon and patisserie. It took five months of wrangling before the famous, and famously rigid, Parisian tea merchant Mariage Freres let her sell their teas. Myers and assistant Tom Mendoza now use tea as a cooking ingredient, sell brewed tea to go and dream of new types of tea tasting -- teas paired with desserts.

A few blocks away, the 12-year-old Chado Tearoom on 3rd Street remains a mainstay of contemporary, international tea in L.A. There’s an upscale, British colonial feel to the decor, but a worldly approach to the menu, which features the cuisine of major tea-drinking regions. A favorite? The Punjab sandwich of hard-cooked eggs marinated in smoked tea and mixed with mayonnaise and chives. By request, proprietors Devan and Reena Shah and their partner at the 2 1/2 -year-old Pasadena location, Tekeste Mehreteab, will usher patrons through a customized tasting of any of their 250 teas.

Tea and happiness

To Tom Kaplan, a good life is inseparable from good food and good tea. Kaplan, who owns the Hugo’s restaurants in West Hollywood and Studio City, offers vegetarian and organic entrees on his extensive menus, along with a diverse 150-item tea menu that he’s tweaked for 20 years.

After many tea-buying trips throughout the Far East, Kaplan is an accomplished tea teacher who also makes his own blends. For new employees and the occasional interested party, he’ll set up his Taiwanese tea tasting set and brew samples from several varieties, including Tou Cha pu-erh, which is slowly aged in caves.

“Every time you make a cup of tea, it’s going to taste differently,” Kaplan says as he demonstrates various brewing methods. Hours after sipping a wide range of teas -- including a Ben Shan Oolong, a green Drum Mountains Clouds and Mist -- the clean taste lingers, but the caffeine boost slowly fades.

“Tea is much more gentle,” says Maria Villanueva, the general manager. “It doesn’t take you up and abandon you like coffee.”

Across West Hollywood, patrons at Elixir Tonics and Teas can sample nearly 40 types of loose-leaf tea or create a custom tonic with various herbal concentrates. Indoors, the dual-personality place emphasizes shopping for all things tea. Outside, it’s all about relaxing in the outdoor garden, site of occasional Buddha jam story readings or tai chi classes. If you have a spare $30 and 20 minutes, you can book a chair massage or reflexology in the adjacent mini-spa.

If your neck knots require further ministrations, the Kinara Spa in West Hollywood will feed you, massage you and provide a French-inflected tea tray for you or a group. Owner Christine Splichal, wife of chef Joachim Splichal, perpetuates the fine-dining example set by their Patina Group restaurants with a contemporary $13 afternoon tea. The all-organic selections are served as a light meal or, should you wish, as a snack during a pedicure. The tea sandwiches include such gourmet ingredients as aged Parmesan cheese or locally made buffalo mozzarella, or for a few dollars more come with a plate of pastries or a glass of champagne.

Tea and curiosities

Over on Fairfax Avenue, the owners of the African Red Tea Rooibos Tea House are challenging the idea of tea as the pursuit of geeky introverts. You might wander in to find the high-energy proprietor Nira Levy Maslin shipping tea to Charlize Theron or planning a combination art show, dance fest and late-night drum circle. She’s tapping into demand for the reddish, slightly sweet and naturally caffeine-free rooibos herbal tea.

Maslin’s partner, Michael Broomberg, is a drummer, movie sound technician and owner of a rooibos import and export business in South Africa. Their year-old storefront salon features African artworks, a grand piano and a bar where Maslin dispenses $1 cups of tea, $5 boxes of 20 teabags and her vast enthusiasm for rooibos. She drinks the tea, cooks with it, sells a skin care line based on it and supplies tea to the Bangkok tea salon and spa run by L.A. skin care guru Ole Henriksen.

For cool points, coffee can’t compete with tea from a samovar. At the Tula Tea Room at the quirky Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, a 200-year-old charcoal-heated brass samovar provides the smoky tea for visitors.

The samovar was made in Tula, near Moscow, says the room’s proprietress, Nana Tchitchoua, a Russian-born artist. Tonight she’s screening her eight-minute movie, “Samovar, or the Dream of a Tea Doll,” which was filmed in the room.

The plot: “It’s a Fellini tea party,” she says.

Down in Little Tokyo, the Zenshuji Buddhist temple regularly offers classes in the sadobu tea ceremony. The sessions, led by tea master Hiromi Yamashita, explore Japanese culture while teaching how to prepare a bowl of green tea.

“We study how to be here now, and how to live in the moment,” Yamashita says as a Buddhist priest in silk robes ladles steaming water from a cast-iron kettle. The elegant process offers guests a hot bowl of tea, a sweet snack and, in the end, the ritual’s spiritual intent. Says Yamashita: “[The ceremony is] to forget about the cares of the world for a while.”

Tea and tradition

When you immerse yourself in the world of tea, you quickly learn that tea time is equally an excuse to eat, especially when you invite a Chinese chef to tea.

“This is our Starbucks,” Theresa Lin Cheng says as she walks into the Phoenix Food Boutique, a Chinese bakery adjacent to the Phoenix Inn restaurant in Alhambra. Cheng, who is a food stylist, chef and commentator on the Chinese-language station KAZN-AM (1300), quickly selects the sweet or savory snacks that are traditional accompaniments to Chinese tea. You might crave a hot wash of strong tea after Cheng’s dessert tour: sweet almond milk soup, warm egg-custard tarts and puddings made from mango or rose bud and longan fruit.

There’s iced tea to go in chrysanthemum, lemon or sugar cane flavors. But it’s the savory snacks that spike the learning curve: spiced duck tongues.

“I’ll show you how my daughter eats them,” Cheng says as she deftly snaps the bony tongue in two, scoops out a pad of fat and nibbles the tender meat.

Next stop, TW Bakery in Temple City, where Cheng raves about the tea pastries crafted from 100-year-old Ching Dynasty recipes. She picks a peach-paste-filled pastry to go with green tea, and finely textured mung bean cookies and delicately layered taro root buns to go with black. Pastries and cookies are flavored with green tea too.

Down the road in Alhambra, we study the tea menu at the newest branch of the Tea Station, a modern Chinese tea house chain that started eight years ago in San Gabriel and may expand to 15 locations in California this year. Chief executive officer Jimmy Huang designed the restaurant as a nighttime hangout for students and as a gathering spot for their parents. The menu offers the younger generation’s favorite tapioca pearl or “boba” drinks, alongside hot brewed tea ($2.40), flavored hot milk tea (try a chocolate milk tea for $3.20) and light meals and sweets.

By special request, Huang or a tea hostess will conduct traditional tastings around the low tea tables in each restaurant. Huang hopes to greatly expand the presence of tea culture when he completes his most ambitious project, a 30,000-square-foot Tea City that he’s planning to open in Rowland Heights in about two years. It’s to contain tea classrooms, a tea garden, tea museum and traditional tea shops that represent Chinese provinces.

Huang has competition now that Americans are developing Asian tea concepts for a wider audience. After living in Taiwan, Zen Zoo co-founder Ritter gained an appreciation for teahouses. Now nearly nine years after that experience, he’s set next week to open a second location at Hollywood and Vine, and is laying plans for further expansion.

“I really saw the tea houses there serving a function -- creating a bit of Zen in the zoo of life, which is our motto,” he says. The veteran restaurateur conceived his L.A. salon as a tea bar, “a safe environment where people could interact.

“Tea is very much a medium for social interaction. It doesn’t make you jump out of your seat like coffee.”

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Steeped thrills

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Forget the dainty sandwiches and doilies. And the boba too. Like wine, tea is gaining sophisticated followers who are creating new tea traditions.

African Red Tea -- Rooibos

This combination tea shop, supplement store and art and music gallery is a retailer and wholesaler of its brand of rooibos, an infusion made from a South African bush. A cup is just a buck.

* 533 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 658-7832, www.africanredtea.com

Boule

Pastry chef Michelle Myers, who with her husband, David, operates Sona, is one of the nation’s few importers of the famed Parisian tea Mariage Freres. She serves it to go at her just-opened patisserie.

* 420 N. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 289-9977

Chado Tea Room

Chado updates the idea of British afternoon tea and offers a 40-page tea menu, an international assortment of sandwiches and salads, and teas and tea implements for sale in an unfussy atmosphere.

* 79 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, (626) 431-2832, and 8422 1/2 W. 3rd St., Los Angeles, (800) 442-4019, www.buychai.com

Da Bo Won

This traditional Korean teahouse features fruit teas and sells bulk boxes to go.

* 3528A W. 8th St., Koreatown, (213) 388-3051

Elixir Tonics and Teas

Though it’s mostly a gift shop and features fruit-juice-and-herb tonics, the tea is serious. Reflexology and chair massage are offered in the mini-spa.

* 8612 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 657-9300

Flower Path Tea House

A traditional outdoor Korean teahouse carved out of the Uptown Nursery.

* 2941 W. Olympic Blvd., Koreatown, no phone available

Hugo’s

Owner Tom Kaplan’s carefully curated 150-item tea list, including organic teas and exotic pu-erh cave teas to sample along with breakfast, lunch or dinner. Tea tastings available by request.

* 8401 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 654-4088, and 12851 Riverside Drive, Studio City, (818) 761-8985, www.hugosrestaurant.com

The Hump

The sushi restaurant has unique features: a good choice of teas, first-rate sushi and a view of the Santa Monica Airport

runway.

* 3221 Donald Douglas Loop S., Santa Monica, (310) 313-0977

Hwa Sun Ji

At this traditional Korean teahouse, generations enjoy green tea, medicinal infusions, fruit-syrup teas and snacks. Bring Korean-speaking friends.

* 3960 Wilshire Blvd., Koreatown, (213) 382-5302

Jin Patisseries

Pastry chef Kristy Choo updates British tea with 35 choices of tea and Asian-inflected sweets and savories that are served in her pastry shop’s garden courtyard.

* 1202 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 399-8801

Kinara

From 3 to 6 p.m., or by request, the combo spa and restaurant offers a healthy update of afternoon tea, which for $13 includes such sandwiches as nicoise tuna salad or tomato and aged Parmesan.

* 656 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-9188

Lavender Lounge

At her salon, tea sommelier Desiree Nelson offers custom blends, tea tastings and snacks.

* 104 N. El Camino Real, Suite B, San Clemente, (949) 218-3103

Le Palais des Thes

The first U.S. branch of the Parisian chain offers tea implements, classes, books and a bar where you can sample 250 varieties of tea. Tea tastings Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday; $30 per person, reservations required.

* 401 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-7922

Michelia

Chef proprietor Kimmy Tang’s tea bar menu features a dozen exotic blends, including pu-erh and chrysanthemum eight-treasure.

* 8738 W. 3rd St., Los Angeles, (310) 276-8288

Phoenix Inn Dessert

This bakery and tea shop adjacent to the landmark Phoenix Inn restaurant offers traditional Chinese tea snacks and sweets, such as mung bean cookies, durian, mango or honeydew puddings, and spiced duck’s tongue.

* 220 E. Valley Blvd., Alhambra, (626) 299-1918, www.phoenixfoodboutique.com

Tea Station

The growing chain offers a mix of modern and traditional tea styles, along with a light Chinese-inspired menu, tea tastings and loose-leaf tea for sale.

* 10 locations, including 158 W. Valley Blvd., San Gabriel, (626) 288-3785 and 560 W. Main St., Alhambra, (626) 289-7389

Ten Ren’s Tea Time

Loose teas are for sale along with traditional Chinese clay teapots, cups and sets. In back, a tea bar dispenses tapioca milk teas, flavored iced tea and, on weekends, tea tastings by request.

* 728 N. Hill St., Chinatown, (213) 626-8844

Tula Tea Room

The tea room on the second floor of the Museum of Jurassic Technology offers light refreshments and a rare chance to sip Russian tea from an antique, coal-heated samovar.

* 9341 Venice Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-6131

TW (or Tsai Tze Sai) Bakery

A Taiwanese pastry chef is reviving the lost art of Ching Dynasty tea pastries at this 4-month-old branch run by the proprietors of the Cathy’s Bakery chain in the San Gabriel Valley.

* 5833 Temple City Blvd., Temple City, (626) 286-7789

Urth Caffe

Though the cafe’s bustling pace is hardly serene, an extensive all-day menu accompanies the 35 loose-leaf and organic herbal teas brewed in a French press.

* 8565 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 659-0628

Zenshuji Soto Mission

The historic Zen Buddhist temple offers ongoing classes in Japanese culture, including tea ceremony, where visitors learn to embrace bliss. First, second and third Saturdays of the month at 1:30 p.m.

* 123 S. Hewitt St., Little Tokyo, downtown Los Angeles, (213) 624-8658, info@zenshuji.org

Zen Zoo

This made-for-Americans modern Taiwanese teahouse offers everything from boba to high-quality loose-leaf teas.

* 13050 San Vicente Blvd., Brentwood, (310) 576-0585

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-- Valli Herman