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 that Sandry Law, our head of procurement, sets 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.