You and Me and Cuppa Tea

I have seen Prasik hill many times from a distance, on my way to my SBP Special School at CBD but never really ventured that far. Yesterday, my friend suggested we go up the winding path to admire the view from the top. It’s a beautiful drive up the narrow snaky lane with a panoramic view of the city below, a beautiful temple, some interesting villas and now an artistic tea store called You, Me & Cuppa Tea.

I was utterly besotted by the entrance itself. Cluster of umbrella, Warli painting on the walls, large jute curtains, and teacup designs everywhere. The ambience was good. The mood was set perfectly to relax on wooden tables.

It is a large place suitable to socialize during ladies tea party, or high-octane social events, or even have small lit-groups and there are smaller cozy rooms with floor furniture for private gathering to write, compose and bring ideas to life.

Everything revolves around tea, not the cutting chai, mind you; the Rs5 cuppa chai that you get at every Mumbai street, Nah! This is a place for tea ceremonies. This is the place where you can experience a wide range of assorted tea of around 170 varied flavors that are fruity, minty, peach, chocolate, citric etc. and different types of tea like oolong, blooming, rooibos, herbal infusion, green, black, mate, etc. of different seasons like winter, fall. It’s a place where there are different pots for brewing different types of tea, in different shapes of cups/mugs and different bites of snacks with every sip.

We left the choice of selecting the tea for us to teaologists, who knew how to brew a special blended tea for us to have a different experience.

He brought blooming bud and inserted in the transparent pot containing warm water. It was fascinating to watch the bud open in the glass teapot and bloom into pretty colored flowers as the bud seeped in.

This is called artisan or flowering teas. They were hand tied by tea artists and include some flavor of fruits and jasmine along with a beautiful design.

The saffron tea was served in tiny glasses that contained almond scrapings. The flavors were very refreshing

We had cookies and cakes with tea, but on their menu card there were some interesting sandwiches and pizzas, maybe next time when I am more hungry

 “TEA LOVERS SOCIETY” Now that is what makes this place so interesting! A community where like minded people and Tea Lovers from different walks of life share experiences, Art, Culture and Business, this is one of the prime objectives behind the conceptualization of "You Me & Cuppa Tea".

Rating ; good

Ambience; good

Bathrooms: unclean, needs improvements

Address:

Everest Housing Society

Parsik Hill, sector 26,27

CBD, Belapur.

Navi Mumbai

Chatting Over a Cup of Tea

Have you ever seen the flower blossom in a tea cup? I hadn’t. Never before!

But yes! This is the moment not to be missed. I had an opportunity to experience this last week at a famous tea house ‘Infinitea’ at Bangalore.

The meaning of tea changes in accordance to its context. Chai-pani is the bribe people give to make their life easier, to avoid long queues and get the work done in a jiffy. Tea-party is the gathering of friends where there is less tea but more oily snacks, where people hold discussions and deals are made. Tea for me is just a chai, a must-have morning cup of tea with milk, sugar and tea-leaves. I may choose to have it at odd times if I am in mood or not have it at all. So when we entered the tea house and was asked if I wanted to have tea, my immediate response was ‘No’

But I soon realized that this was no ordinary tea house when I saw the waiter place the cups, the tea pots, the strainer, and the sand-timer in front of us.

I started to study the menu card. Infinitea peddles a variety of exotic teas like Stupa, White tea, Silver Blossom, Dragon Pearl, Rosette, there was variety that ranged from oolong, black tea, green tea, and herbal, exotic, fruity tea. How do people decide what they want?

It was difficult for my friends to decide too and all of them climb down the stairs from the mezzanine floor where we were sitting, to get the first hand knowledge of what they would like to taste, then came back gleaming, ear-to-ear, pleased at being able to choose the one that was most suitable to their palate.

While we waited for the tea, I looked around. There were posters everywhere. If you have forgotten to carry a book, fear not, there was enough literature and amazing posters adorning the walls that professed that sensitivitea, serendipitea, sensualitea are all linked to tea.

The order arrived, the glass pots with warm water were placed in front of us. He put tea-leaves of different flavors in each pot and allowed it to brew right in front of us as he turned the sand timer over.  Variety of flavors included vanilla milk oolong, Elixir, Enigma and most interesting of all was a black tea bud. This was the most fascinating of all. We watched the bud blossom in warm water, growing in size each second, unfolding a pink flower.

Naturally, I was curious to taste it.

Poured a sip from each pot, one by one tasted the different flavor of different fragrance and loved it.

Infinitea was launched in Bangalore with an aim to offer what is known as the “Champagne of teas” for Indian consumers. This was the first tea-shop to be set up anywhere in the world. The Infinitea logo promises ‘from leaf to cup’ which really means straight from the grower, fresh from the garden to your cup with no middle man. You get Darjeeling tea manufactured in First Flush (April) by June the same year.

Beside great variety of tea, the place offers exotic snacks too. A good two hours were spent leisurely, sipping tea, dinning and then deserts

.

On our way out, some of them bought tea leaves to take back home.