What’s this … Argo Tea, open? Oh sweet mother of tea, I’m in trouble now.
Here I was, just last Tuesday drinking in oversized photos of such luscious tea beverages as Earl Grey Vanilla Crème and Tea Sangria (check out the menu here, and see the photo below) and wondering how long I’d have to wait.
In fact, I needed only wait until Friday — the pictures came down to reveal an airy, modern tea shop; smiling baristas chat with customers about the rewards program (it’s one of those accumulate points for free tea deals) and rave about the seasonal ValenTea Passion — an herbal blend of passion fruit and hibiscus flowers that’s being rationed out in 2 oz. samples — or, perhaps, one of the tea time appropriate finger sandwiches.
Long tubes of loose tea along the back wall look to be arranged by color, when in fact it’s a gradation of tea type: black teas fade into green teas, which fade into herbal and other exotic tea types.
Up close, they’re beautiful: Giant, dried balls of jasmine tea (a personal favorite); a Masala chai flecked with dried ginger, cinnamon, cardamom and vanilla; a genmaicha — green tea blended with roasted brown rice — that, blended with some steamed milk and a caramel flavor shot “tastes just like caramel corn,” promises a barista.
(FYI: The staff is perhaps overly friendly here by New York standards — but they are also full of useful information.)
Free sample alert: Tea Sangria on ice
“Hmm… Two free hours of wifi with tea purchase, you say?”
There’s a spot at that oversized communal table that’s got my name on it — the only problem I foresee is once the word’s out it’ll be hard to get a seat. On Day Two, which also happens to be an early Saturday evening, the table was already covered in laptops and newspapers.
Argo Tea may have taken its sweet time getting here — after opening 15 locations in Chicago, the brand has finally expanded to New York — but it looks like it’s settling in quickly.
Argo Tea, 949 Broadway, at 22nd Street, 646-755-7262. Additional locations opening at NYU and Columbus circle presently.
towards hot and cold cups, plasticware, those little shitty tri-fold napkins, salt and pepper packets, coffee and tea accouterments and other condiment packets? And what sort of hit do the delis take because of people like me who are constantly pocketing a little extra to stash away in office desk drawers?
a.) ever drink tea, hot or iced
Ginger soothes the soul, I’m convinced. 
I mean if we’re comparing apples to apples, green tea certainly is not the tea drinker’s half-caff. So why list “light caffine” as the third bullet point front-and-center on the packaging unless Mighty Leaf is advertising the fact that they’ve actually gone in and lightly decaffinated the tea? Therein lies they travesty, at least in my view, tired already before the day’s begun, chugging away on the Long Island Rail Road before the clock’s even struck 8 a.m.
I believe in eating when you’re hungry, which I’m apparently not this morning, so I’m easing into the day with some of the sweetest-tasting orange juice I’ve had in a long time — actually the flavor and bright orange-y color lead me to believe it is, in fact, not orange juice at all but tangerine juice.
I don’t know what they put in this stuff* but 
From the street it was the large triangular slices of cake in the window of the 
My contender: an egg-custard filled pastry ($0.70), a whitest-of-white-bread, mildly sweet, oblong roll with a sugary, crusted topping. Perfect with a strong, black tea, I thought, and I had just the one in my desk drawer. Better yet, why not make an Asian-style milky tea with my Twinning’s Irish Breakfast! Now I was on to something. I 
detoured by a deli for a half-pint of nonfat milk at my local deli (look at those cartons there, like little soldiers, all lined up).
