Nirvana in a Teapot

For Americans, tea drinking is a quintessentially British pastime. There’s something stuffy about tea and its accouterments—high-backed chairs, Devonshire cream, porcelain saucers and ostentatious pinkie fingers. Owing to this imagined heritage, the advent of chains like Tealuxe and proliferation of trendy herbal tea-shops might seem a flourish of Anglophilia, as if the alterna-caffeine crowd were hankering to sip chamomile with the Queen Mother herself. A new teashop in Cambridge aims to shatter this image with a taste of original tea. Truth is, the British have only taken tea-time for 350 years. The Chinese, on the other hand, have been at it for five thousand.

Dado Tea—which opened in Central Square just three weeks ago—takes drinking and teaching tea seriously. According to part-owner Jennie Song, her store receives regular visits from the manager of Harvard Square’s Tealuxe, who’s a big fan. Song’s not one to boast, however, or give in to the tea-drinker’s temptation of pretentiousness (why does she like tea? “The taste,” she says). A native Korean, Song discovered her passion while backpacking through Asia. She sampled teas in Buddhist monasteries, Beijing hotels and New Delhi cafes. Returning to the states, she now studies Confucian Ethics at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and devotes her spare time to bringing fine tea to Cambridge.

Sipping one of Dado’s Bubble Teas, it’s easy to be grateful for her choice. A Taiwanese favorite, the Bubble Tea ($3.50) has grown in popularity in the US, spreading east from California. It features pea-sized pearls of rice tapioca at the bottom of the glass that shoot through the extra-wide straw into your mouth like glutinous bullets. Bubble teas are often made from a powder that gives them a syrupy sweetness, but at Dado, they’re made with loose tea leaves that give the drink a delicate flavor. And the highlight, the tapioca pearls, are soft, sweet, and stick-to-your-teeth gooey.

For the tea purist, the array of options at Dado are few, but well-chosen. Song says that many patrons who come in asking for green tea are befuddled by Dado’s four premium options: Japanese Green, Korean Green, Oolong Green and Oolong Green with Ginseng. A sit-‘n’-stay pot costs $3, slightly more than Tealuxe’s personal pot, but the high quality makes an extra dime worthwhile. If you come with friends, they’ll each have to pay $1.75 to share the pot (a group of three would pay $6.50). Don’t come to Dado expecting herbal teas, however. They’re committed to real tea, and stock only a peppermint herbal to placate thirsty novices. Rounding out the offerings, Dado also serves delicious fruit Lassi ($3.25-4), pastries by acclaimed Boston baker Nick Case ($3-4) and light meals (bagels, sandwiches, maki sushi, soup).

Dado is Korean for “way of tea” and the shop offers patrons plenty of ways to steep themselves in tea-knowledge. Except for water, tea rivals milk as the world’s most ancient beverage. Legend has it that Emperor Shen Nung (2727 BC) discovered tea when a fortuitous leaf fell into water that his servants were boiling for drinking. All of the different varieties of loose-leaf tea—green, oodong, black, pü ‘erh—come from a single plant, Camellia sinesnis. Each pot of tea at Dado comes with a small booklet with information on tea history and details on how to properly steep a pot.

As far as setting, there’s not much beyond linoleum, track-lighting and wooden tables to recommend Dado as a hip venue. But, even so, it’s hard to fight the attraction of a fine tea. Maybe it’s the clean taste. Maybe it’s the warmth that a cup sends radiating from deep inside. Or maybe it’s just the new-age charm of being the kind of together person who finds an hour each afternoon to sip, smile and unwind. Buddhist monks have made the time for centuries, so why shouldn’t you?