About T Shop

T Shop is a tea room in New York City devoted to traditional brews from Taiwan, China, and Korea. Every year, we return to Asia to seek out the highest quality loose leaf tea we can find to share with our customers in New York and around the world. We source directly from farmers and work with partners that have decades of experience in the tea trade.

We believe in tea without pretense. A great tea tells its own story, and our goal is to help you hear it. That’s why we don’t clutter our packaging with baroque tasting notes or bucolic tales of tea estates. We share the tea. The journey is up to you.

Head to our shop page to see our collection of fine teas and porcelain and yixing teaware.

How We Find Our Tea

Our sourcing follows one simple rule: we only buy what we love to drink. We’ve spent years developing relationships with farmers and trusted merchants to find premium teas at a quality rarely accessible to the Western market.

While we offer many kinds of tea, our focus is on single-origin, unblended styles that have stood the test of time. No trendy ingredients, no talk of health benefits; we focus on artisan products that reflect the terroir of their environments and skill of their producers. To bring the best of these traditional teas to you, we frequently commission private batches of teas that would otherwise never make it to market.

Good tea makes you feel good, and when we evaluate a tea, taste is just the beginning. We also consider the brew’s aroma and lasting finish, and particularly seek out teas that stimulate your mind and relax your whole body.

While this holistic approach to tea is common in Asia, it’s still relatively new to the United States, where a razor focus on flavors and tasting notes reign supreme. At our shop, we help guests explore these deeper levels of appreciation. Pay a visit to try a cup yourself, and stop by our weekly events to meet some new tea friends, because a cup of tea is always best when shared.

Our Tea Experts

Theresa Wong is one of New York City’s leading authorities on East Asian tea, and has over 10 years of experience tasting, sourcing, and educating others about tea. In 2014, she opened T Shop as a tasting room and gathering place for the city’s active tea community, and she regularly leads panels and seminars about tea history and culture. For Theresa, tea isn’t just a drink; it’s a lifestyle, and she’s particularly passionate about helping her guests appreciate how there is to find in a simple cup.

For Hyun Lee, drinking quality tea has always been a daily routine, not a special practice. But questions from curious co-workers prompted her to dig deeper into the Korean teas and tisanes she brought to the office, and she eventually developed a passion for tea culture that led her to join Theresa on a sourcing trip to Taiwan in 2016. Soon she was stopping by for tea every day. Now, as a partner at T Shop, she still considers tea to be a daily routine, and she delights in making it accessible to everyone.