Mei Yang

Mei Yang is a Senior Tea Expert specializing in oolong and black tea varieties, particularly celebrated for her work with Phoenix Mountain dancong oolongs and Guangdong black teas. Her career began in a family restaurant in Chaozhou, where she first matched teas with regional dishes. Training under master roaster Chen Weisheng in the late 1990s refined her palate for single-bush dancong, especially the Mí Lán Xiāng (蜜兰香) cultivar. Since joining Teamotea in 2015, she has designed tea programmes for over three dozen high-end restaurants across Europe and North America, with a focus on pairing teas alongside tasting menus. Her work bridges traditional Chinese tea ceremony precision with contemporary dining demands, often drawing from her experience as a sommelier for a Michelin-starred restaurant in Lyon from 2008–2012.

In 2024, Mei launched the Michelin-track pairing intensive, a two-day masterclass held at tea.school that equips sommeliers with structured pairing frameworks using twelve reference teas including Lapsang Souchong (正山小种) and aged Shēng Pǔ'ěr (生普洱). The programme culminates in a collaborative dinner where participants design pairings for a multi-course meal. That same year, she co-hosted the Paris bridge dinner — tea and natural wine, an experimental evening where low-intervention wines and aged oolongs were served in alternating flights to explore overlapping terrain. Her contributions extend to the community’s editorial side: her thread “Tea pairings for a tasting menu — what we've learned” on tea.restaurant distills three years of practical insight from real restaurant deployments, covering temperature, sequence, and the challenge of non-alcoholic pairings.

Mei’s teaching style is methodical and rooted in repeated tasting. At the Tea Restaurant programme-build cohort, she leads sessions on constructing a tea list — from procurement through shop.thetea.app to service training protocols. She often recommends restaurants begin with three teas: a bright Fenghuang dancong to open, a rich Jīn Jūn Méi (金骏眉) for mid-course depth, and an aged white tea to close. Her current research explores cold-brewed oolong as a service-friendly alternative to wine for summer menu cycles. Outside the consultancy, she contributes to the teamotea.com journal and occasionally guest-curates selections for tea.events. Her professional compass remains anchored in one question: how can tea make a meal more memorable?