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Dieter Folz
 
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Default Tea and Dining out

(seby1689) wrote in message . com>...
> Hi,
>
> This is my first time posting to rec.food.drink.tea. I was wondering
> whether you guys could help me deal with the issue of getting quality
> tea when dining out. I have the pleasure of drinking my loose-leaf
> teas at home, but people tend to drag me to coffee-shops that have
> horrendous tea.
>
> Whether its Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks, I can't stand the inferior
> taste of their bagged teas. And I am no fan of coffee either, so I
> won't have that instead.
>
> So the question is, what's a tea lover supposed to do when meeting
> someone in a place like that?
>
> I can't exactly bring my mesh ball with loose leaves and tell the
> server to bour boiling water over it. I am pretty sure that they'd
> give me a weird look and tell me they couldn't do that for me.


Hi Seby,

here in Germany it's pretty much the same. You order a tea, and they
bring you a glass (!) with a
"cheapest-tea-availible-on-the-market-but-at-least-with-a-'brand-name'-on-it-tea-bag"
(and German tea bags are the worst in the world!), ducked into a kind
of warm water (of course, it is not hot). I never saw someone ordering
a coffee and getting a spoon with instant coffee and nearly cold
water; no, they always serve just a decent cup of coffee, and the
coffee is always hot, made freshly from grind coffe in a coffee- or
espresso-machine. BTW a glass of cheap tea bag tea costs the same as a
cup of coffee! So, they give a crap, when you ask just for hot water
(even if it isn't hot). And even at the university caffeteriea you
have to pay the full price only for hot water, whether you take one of
their non-brand-chepest-crap-of-tea tea bags with it or not (there is
a special big sign which tells all customers (mostly students) this
fact!)! And the coffeteria is just paid by the students with an extra
fee they have to pay for it every semester.

Well, let's go back to tea and dining out. Mostly, you can get a
decent Jasmine-Tea at Chinese restaurants (served traditionally in a
chinese tea pot of 0,5 litres and refilled with really warm water
every time you ask for without extra costs). Some also offer a quite
nice Keemun (which I prefer after dinner, instead of an espresso).
There are also turkish or arabic restaurants where a very very sweet
but decent Ceylon tea is served in small, tiny glasses (personally, I
don't like it very much). Intersesting enough, it is obvious, that you
can't get a decent cuppa in Indian restaurants...

From the US I heard by some friends, that the Barnes & Nobles coffee
shops offer a small variety of decent teas.

But over all, we are forced to drink water or somethong else than tea
when dining out :-(.


Dieter