TenRen Manhattan Chinatown
www.tenrenusa.com
Tea Shop - sells its own brand of tea
75 Mott St
Manhattan, NY 10013
(212) 349-2286
Reviews
★★★★★Alex Zorach (1453 tea reviews) on Mar. 9th, 2015
I love this store and hit it up whenever I'm in NYC's Chinatown. I wish Philadelphia, where I live, had one of these stores. The NYC store is the closest to where I live, and the bulk teas sold here are unavailable to me except by mail-order.
This store, at 75 Mott St, is the tea shop; two doors down, at 79 Mott st., is the bubble tea bar, which I stay away from. I'm a huge fan of this store. It's a decent-sized store, and doesn't feel cramped. There are some displays around the room with teaware and loose-leaf tea, but what really draws me here is the bulk tea behind the counter.
As I commented in the review of the Chicago location (this one is more or less similar, just with perhaps a bit less space), what makes this store stand out the most is that it stocks different grades of most types of tea. This can be a bit intimidating to newcomers...do I buy 1st grade? 2nd? 3rd? 4th? The prices are hugely different.
If you're not a tea connoisseur, I recommend starting with the 3rd or possibly 4th grades. They're surprisingly good, for many of the teas. For example, the Pouchong (Bao Zhong) 3rd grade, here, I think is much, much better than.
My one complaint about this place is the packaging. If you don't buy a tin or bring your own bag or tin, the default is to put the tea leaf in a paper bag and then wrap that in a plastic bag--not exactly the best way to store tea if you want to keep it fresh. This is a minor complaint; it's not a big deal to transfer the tea to your own container, and the prices and quality here are excellent. I especially recommend the greener oolongs, like the Pouchong or Tung Ting; I think these are the true strength of this company.
