Restaurants

Don't you just love a good cup of tea?
And you'd think here in London, capital of a tea-drinking nation, we'd be spoilt for choice. Not so, unfortunately. You can get a lovely cuppa in a few hotels, cafés and a clutch of specialist tea rooms. However, most London brews are teabag standard, fine with milk and sugar - but not very appealing on their own.

Tea Smith is aimed at tea-drinkers who want something more. It's a new shop and tea room in Old Spitalfields Market, run by a husband-and-wife team, John Kennedy and Tomoko Kawase. It's not the first of its kind - Postcard Teas and Tea Palace are also notable - but it's the most ambitious so far. Tomoko is an architect and the interior – which has a recognisably Japanese aesthetic with simple, clean lines and great attention to detail – was designed by Jonathan Clark Architects. The room's better organised than the sock drawer of a Zen master with obsessive compulsive disorder - you could probably reach satori just contemplating the storage systems.

It's husband Kennedy who mans the shop on a daily basis, with the help of his young assistants. It's very soothing just to sit at the counter and chat to the charming staff as they make a pot of tea for you.

Piping-hot filtered water is dispensed from a steel spout in the counter, and the water cooled to the ideal temperature (55oC-90oC depending on the tea), checked by thermometer before brewing and pouring into tiny cups before brewing the second and third infusions.

Kennedy is a tea geek. Before opening the establishment, he spent 18 months researching teas in China and Japan, including two summers with a tea master in Hong Kong. He's sourced products direct from the Far East: scented and flower teas (such as jasmine), white teas (such as silver needle), Japanese and Chinese green teas, semi-fermented oolong teas (such as teguanyin), and the red, black and aged teas that the British favour, including Darjeeling and Assam. At the counter you can try a score of teas, from Far Eastern green teas such as Korean 'sparrow's tongue', which has an appealing herbaceous freshness; or pu'er, an aged tea that smells of musty hay bales when brewed.

There are also nibbles, supplied by renowned pâtisserie William Curley in Richmond, Surrey, whose pâtissier wife Suzue happens to be Japanese. The chocolate yuzu cake was rich but not sweet, a dense little confection plentiful in cocoa solids but with a citrus edge.

A sliver of Earl Grey tea cake was more understated, but equally perfect.

If you are seduced by the teas and the tea experience, you can buy sealed foil packs to take away (from around £4 per 50g, depending on the tea). Tea Smith also has a beautiful selection of oriental teapots, cups, placemats, whisks and spoons. Masterclasses in tea appreciation are planned next month, and should become a regular fixture if they're successful. Now, whose turn is it to brew up?

Time Out London Issue 1906: February 28-March 6 2007