Fang Ting

Fang Ting's journey with tea began in the mountains of Henan, where she grew up watching her family harvest Xìn Yáng Máo Jiān (信阳毛尖) — a delicate green tea with needle-fine leaves. After formal training in sensory evaluation in 2014, she apprenticed under Wuyi master Liao Zhong in 2015, learning the craft of charcoal roasting for Yán Chá (岩茶) like Dà Hóng Páo (大红袍) and Shuǐ Xiān (水仙). Over the next years, she split her seasons between the Wuyi cliffs and the ancient tea forests of Yunnan, adding raw and ripe pu-erh to her repertoire. Her cross-category cupping practice now spans hundreds of single-origin lots, including 2007 Shēng Pǔ'ěr (生普洱) from Nannuo Mountain and a 2012 Mí Lán Xiāng (蜜兰香) Phoenix oolong.

At tea.restaurant, Fang Ting translates this depth into practical restaurant systems. She works with chefs and sommeliers to select teas that hold up through kitchen heat and fast service, while also rewarding slow attention. Her thread, "Glassware vs Yixing on the pass — what works in restaurant service," examines how thin porcelain gaiwans preserve high notes in a busy dining room, while Yixing clay brings warmth to aged pu-erh at a quiet chef’s table. The findings — complete with side-by-side aroma breakdowns — have become core reading in her curriculum at tea.school, where she leads the Certificate in Tea for Hospitality.

Fang Ting’s consulting engagements have ranged from a dim sum house in Melbourne to a fine-dining concept in Saint Petersburg, always grounding foreign cuisine in the right Chinese tea pairing. Her approach is calm, empirical, and firmly tied to the leaf: every recommendation starts with water temperature, steep timing, and vessel material tested against a dish’s salt, fat, and acidity. When not traveling to source from small farms in Yunnan and Fujian, she hosts cupping sessions at tea.community and contributes tasting notes to puerh.app — always with the same attention that she expects a line cook to give a garnish. Her training with Tea Doctor’s herbalist team in 2020 deepened her understanding of tea’s effect on digestion — a key factor for pairing with rich restaurant menus. She now integrates this knowledge into workshops for teams at tea.equipment, where she tests new clay blends for their thermal properties.