Tea Is So Hot Right Now

The New York City teahouse Soft Hours opened in May with the goal of helping visitors explore the diversity of tea. | James K Lowe/Soft Hours

In Los Angeles, Tea at Shiloh describes itself as a “late night teahouse.” Here, visitors can reserve slots from 7 to 11 p.m. to sip unlimited amounts of tea — at this hour, all herbal, with blends made by each day’s staff — and sprawl out in nooks of plush cushions, in a warmly lit loft with tall ceilings and exposed brick, while jazz musicians play in a corner. “I was looking for soft spaces in the evening,” says founder Shiloh Enoki, who opened the eponymous teahouse in 2022.

Enoki previously worked in the music industry, and her experience with nightlife was often loud and centered on the more performative aspects of dating (“being perceived by guys,” she says). For her new venture, “All I wanted to do was drink tea, listen to jazz, be cozy, and still have the opportunity to meet strangers.” Tea felt like a conduit to an alternative space. While coffee shops tend to encourage a practice of grab and go, or of work or hustle culture, “that’s not the energy of tea,” according to Enoki. “Tea is like, I’m gonna sit here for hours and I’m gonna have a deep conversation with the person sitting across from me , and that’s so rare in our culture.”

Despite tea’s astounding popularity globally, the United States has long lagged behind many other countries when it comes to tea consumption, and that conception of tea has mostly been limited to iced black tea. This, however, appears to be changing , with the U.S. importing far more tea — in the hundreds of millions of dollars — this decade than it did 30 years ago, with millennials in particular the most likely to be tea drinkers. Matcha is, obviously, everywhere; according to the New Consumer, it usurped chai as the leading specialty tea drink in cafes . A lot more tea, it seems, is about to follow, as new tea-focused businesses sprout up across the country and as tea sees increased applications as a flavor element in food, desserts, and cocktails in addition to its consumption as a standalone drink.

Across the country, teahouses with a similar ethos to Enoki’s are catering to the desire for another kind of space: one that feels slower and more intentional than the average coffee shop, and which offers a different experience than yet another restaurant or high-end cocktail bar. In July, “tea salon” Han Cha opened in Chicago, serving a selection of nine teas from Chicago-based tea company Spirit in the format of British high tea . Over the course of the two-hour-long booking, guests might sip Taiwanese black tea with notes of quince and orange blossom alongside bites of English cheddar and Korean-style quick pickles, or Thai white tea with Japanese curry pimento cheese sandwiches.

Heiji Black, who partnered with artist Theaster Gates (in whose Stony Island Arts Bank building the concept is located) on the venture, is compelled by the way tea “makes people slow down and savor the experience.” She cites the teahouses she grew up going to in Korea, which were “really about being social and meeting with people and connecting with them,” as inspiration for Han Cha.

At Tea at Shiloh, Enoki also tries to emphasize being in the moment. While the cafe welcomes co-working, especially during the day, she says she wanted to design the experience at night such that people “don’t want to be on their laptop or their phone.” Rather than enforce a hard no-laptop policy, Tea at Shiloh offers other things for people to do with their hands, like games, clay, and watercolors. The dim lighting and communal seating also offer “subtle cues” that the space, at night, isn’t a place for being lost in a screen, she explains.

Even teahouses that don’t serve matcha, like Tea at Shiloh, cite its importance in the current teahouse moment. In May, the artist Juno Shen opened Soft Hours , a teahouse in Manhattan’s Chinatown. (A laptop-free space, it draws inspiration from the Song dynasty, which Shen describes as a “culturally rich era” in which scholars “built rituals around slowing down and shifting your attention.”) “Matcha and boba have done something really important in making tea culture relevant to a younger generation, and I think we’re reaching a point where people are asking, What else is there? ” Shen says. At Soft Hours, there is no matcha whisked in front of you, poised for a TikTok video. Likewise, “we don’t do boba; we don’t do cold foam. We moved away from all the performance that a trendy tea place would have.”

Instead, Shen’s menu hews toward a selection of Chinese teas: streamlined but still showing range. There’s green tea fragrant with jasmine; two kinds of oolong, one oxidized in a way that gives it notes of plum and the other roasted over charcoal until it evokes toasted nuts; black tea with a honey-like body; and a deeply woodsy fermented pu’erh. Perhaps the main concession to trends is that every tea can be ordered as an iced latte as well, which Shen considers a way for people to “softly get introduced” to tea. “I’m not presenting something that’s extremely traditional, so I think I’m just the next step of [people] exploring a little bit more about tea,” Shen says. “I think the next stage of tea culture in America should move beyond individual ingredients becoming trendy [and into] the understanding of tea as this incredibly diverse seasonal category.”

Tian Tea House opened in Kansas City, Missouri, in late 2025. Matcha drinks are far and away the most popular, according to co-owner Saranya Hubbard. “I really don’t have to advertise anything that much — it already sells itself,” she says. But similarly to Shen, Hubbard, who grew up in Thailand surrounded by the tea culture in Bangkok’s Chinatown, sees her teahouse as an opportunity to showcase the wider variety of Asian tea culture. Tian brews and offers classes on Chinese gongfu tea and serves lesser-known Thai tea, including one...

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