a community, not a catalogue
tea.restaurant does not sell tea. It is the community and reference layer for people who do — the place a sommelier goes to work out why a Fènghuáng Dān Cōng (凤凰单丛) collapses next to a dish that should have loved it, or why a shú pǔ’ěr (熟普洱) that tested beautifully in the cupping room turns to wet cardboard by table twelve. That distinction matters inside the wider Teamotea constellation: tea.school teaches the structured curriculum, tea.degree builds the sensory-calibration tools that sharpen a palate, and tea.dog exists to track down a single rare lot when a restaurant wants something no wholesaler stocks. tea.restaurant sits between all three, translating their depth into the language of a working floor — service temperature, pour timing, cost per cover, and the three sentences a server needs to describe a tea with confidence.
six categories, one supply chain
Everything discussed here traces back to real Chinese tea: the six recognised categories — lǜ chá (绿茶) green, bái chá (白茶) white, huáng chá (黄茶) yellow, wūlóng (乌龙) oolong, hóng chá (红茶) black, and hēi chá (黑茶) dark, including pǔ’ěr (普洱) — sourced from named regions and, wherever a thread cites one, a named grower or factory. No blends stand in for provenance, and no country outside China supplies the leaf. When a restaurant is ready to move from tasting samples to a standing order, wholesale.teamotea.com prices Teamotea’s catalogue by the kilo, with the same transparent cost-per-cup logic set out in the community’s costing threads.
who keeps the programme honest
The experts below split the work by category and region — dancong and black tea from Guangdong, green and yellow from Hunan, white tea from Fujian, cross-regional ageing from the old caravan routes, and procurement from Kunming — so that whatever question a restaurant brings, someone here has already answered it under service pressure.