Two For Tea
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday August 6, 2002
Sip on some peace and quiet amid the frantic city.
The Tea Centre
THE GLASS HOUSE,
146 PITT STREET
MALL, CITY.
TEL: 9223 9909.
Open Mon-Wed and Fri 9am-5.30pm, Thu 9am-8pm, Sat 10am-5pm.
Tried Small soup of the day ($6), large soup of the day ($7.50), smoked salmon roll ($7.50), turkey breast roll ($7.50), pot of glogg tea ($4.30), pot of strawberry-cream infusion tea ($4.30).
Bottom line for two
$37.10
Okakura Kakuzo, in his 1906 The Book of Tea, pointed out: "The white man has scoffed at our religion and our morals but has accepted the brown beverage without hesitation."
Humanity, Kakuzo believed, met in the teacup.
It doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but you can also meet humanity to drink something like 200 blends of cha at The Tea Centre, a brown oasis in the epicentre of The Glass House, that gleaming white-and-chrome malformation in Pitt Street Mall.
I had with me St Clare's College work experience student Catherine Naghten, 16, who led me into the sweet-smelling calm of The Tea Centre, where she revealed that she doesn't like tea.
"Please tell me you like to eat," I pleaded, seeing the lunch going to the dogs. And so she does, wolfing down an oven-roasted roll with Swiss cheese, cranberry sauce, green leafy stuff and
sun-dried tomato like it was going out of fashion.
The small chicken and sweetcorn soup, which was served after the roll because the helpful and happy waitress forgot about it, was also polished off but not without the complaint that it was rather too sweetcorny. The taste test confirmed it: this is the world's sweetest sweetcorn and a chicken was once waved over the top of it.
Not so the large-size clam chowder soup, which was a thick, creamy white concoction with a decent number of both vegetables and the requisite bivalve molluscs. My (entree) sandwich consisted of smoked salmon, dill mayonnaise, avocado and mixed leaves slammed between soft damper-style slices of bread. It is exactly as described, which is always a result, I reckon.
The menu isn't extensive but you're there for the tea, after all. I chose a special blend called glogg (cinnamon, orange peel, almond, ginger, cloves and cardamom) and Catherine bravely opted for the strawberry-cream fruit infusion.
The teas came in little glass pots with the leaves suspended in a stainless steel cage. There was helpful advice from the waitress about not leaving it in the water too long. My advice would be to order the tea early and let it cool down; it is hard to appreciate the taste when it is scalding your lips.
The glogg (chosen because of the name) reminded me of cold British winter evenings sipping mulled wine around fires and even No-Tea Naghten confessed she enjoyed her infusion.
For surreptitious note-taking purposes we sat outside the shop, but if you decide to give it a visit I'd try to find a spot inside, where the tea-leaf smells, the twee teapots and tea caddies (all for sale), the dark wood and an olde-worlde charm combine to leave you feeling relaxed and at peace with the world.
I leave the last words for Okakura Kakuzo: "Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things."
See? Even Kakuzo reads Eat up.
© 2002 Sydney Morning Herald