How Korean Tea is Defying the Rules in NYC
Brewing for feeling with Hyun Lee of T Shop
It’s quiet at first. But a few sips in, this tea begins to taste like chocolate.
Unmistakably, I’m drinking hot chocolate, the kind thick and ripe from a semisweet bar and not much else. I’m in middle school, unwrapping a truffle from the jar on my teacher’s desk, letting it melt on my tongue, not another thought in my head. I’m blistering on a cacao farm on the equator, chewing a dark, fruity nib, smelling trees and earth and 2016.
But really, I’m in a tucked-away tea counter in Nolita, of all places. It’s a rainy Monday, and I’m trying Korean hwangcha.
“It’s fun,” chuckles Hyun Lee, co-owner of T Shop.
Lee and I are sitting low and close, across the shop’s wooden, four-seat counter, nestled in our own, tiny, cabin-like world. She sets out what look like pine needles, if they changed color in autumn, onto a celadon dish. Nimbly rolled, these are tea leaves from Hadong, the sandy, southern coastal county of South Korea.
With hot water, the leaves go into a thin-walled, lidded porcelain bowl. Soon, strained into glass, the brew reveals itself. Lee pours me most of the buttery, yolk-colored steep — almost fatty and meaty — and also a bit for herself, in a Ferrero Rocher-sized teacup. We’re sipping. And because we’re sipping, our cheeks are smiling at each other, on their own accord. In deft choreography, Lee brews once, then twice, and then I realize we’ve drunk the chocolatey leaves four (or is it six?) times. I see the caffeine and her ambient bossa nova radio dancing samba together in front of me, and then I feel their rhythm throughout my body, from my cheeks doing their own silly, awkward thing, to my gut warming up and greeting its friends, to my fingertips entering an uncontrollable jazz hand state of mind. Now, we’re all dancing together. I am gleefully, undoubtedly, colorfully tea drunk. Is this even tea?
New York City has a plethora of thoughtful places to drink loose-leaf brews and boba hailing from China and Taiwan, as well as matcha from Japan. But T Shop is one of only a few shops in the city serving Korean teas: a genre that is much less talked about, and one that evades neat definition.
