The Tea House Edit

Cozy and magical place :)

This is the place to go for your staple teas – Earl Grey, English Breakfast, Ceylon, Nilgiri, Kenya, Keemun – as they sell fairly decent teas and very good prices. The tea won’t be in nice boxes (as in Whittards), or caddies (as in Fortnum), but it will be well priced.
Their teaware section, on the second floor, is vast and very poorly organized. Take the time to browse – they are also well priced, and the selection is one of the largest that you’ll find.

I rate this shop much higher for its unusual tea-ware than for the actual tea. It carries quite a large variety, yes, but most of them seem to be flavored teas that don’t even necessarily contain actual pieces of the fruit or whatever’s meant to be flavoring them; a lot of them are artificial aromas. You can find a few single-estate varieties of green and black teas here, as well as a large selection of bagged/boxed teas. Head upstairs for the staggering array of teacups, pots, and other paraphernalia once you’ve had a look at the ones they keep in the glass cases downstairs. Very pleasing to the eye!

This tea shop was definitely bustling when I came in! The smallish storefront in Covent Garden is packed full of tea. They offer some tinned “souvenir” tea (of unknown origin) and various boxes of tea bags, but the real focus of this store is their own loose-leaf tea. All of the tea is pre-packaged into shiny metallic 100g bags (some red, some silver), and there are stoppered jars for smelling for every tea. They have a wide range of teas from unflavored blacks and greens to fruit tisanes. The shop was busy, so I was pretty much left alone, but I’m not sure if more help would have been offered if it was less crowded, and I didn’t ask for any. The tea was very reasonably priced, and seems to be of good quality.

A nice tea place to stop into, especially if you’re in the Covent Garden area going to other tea shops already!