Plentea converts
Tea house on Queen St. W. brews a cup without a bag
It’s definitely having a moment right now — even giving coffee a run for its money.
Nothing can replace our morning’s traditional deep, dark drink, but tea is certainly presenting a more compelling argument than ever before to become our day’s first sip. And our afternoon’s go-to pick me up.
“It’s a nice, easy transition to alertness — not a jolt up or down,” says devout tea lover Tariq Al Barwani, 32.
“You’re taken for a ride when you drink tea — a nice, gradual wakefulness. And when you come down it’s not a sharp drop.”
And the trick to a really good cup, he says, is not letting a tea bag get between the drinker and the experience.
There isn’t one in sight at Plentea, the barely six-week-old tea shop Al Barwani co-owns along with friend and business partner Mohammed Bin Yahya, 31.
Instead, staff brew each cup with herbs they dispense from large con- tainers, either grinding them by hand in a pestle and mortar, whisking matchas or pressing the tea mixes through what they call a “teapresso” machine — it looks like an espresso machine, but presses hot water through tea, rather than ground beans.
“It extracts the flavour,” Al Barwani says.
And it was an essential part of the business — to quickly brew bagless tea — even though Al Barwani and Bin Yahya didn’t have such an apparatus growing up in Abu Dhabi.
The men each spent their childhoods steeped in a strong tea tradition where the drink was a conduit to — and result of — spending time with family.
Relatives would each brew his or her own secret recipe then compete for the best. “It’s a social drink,” Al Barwani says.
Those memories were front and centre a few years ago when the men met — not in Abu Dhabi, but as engineering students in Calgary — and decided to open their shop.
More and more patrons every day happen upon their lofty, sunlit space in Parkdale, at 1205 Queen St. W. They trickle in and stare at the menu along the shop’s high eastern wall. One by one they are wooed away from the espressos (Plentea does serve coffee too, of course) and over to the teas and tea lattes.
The descriptions are seductive; the smells intoxicating and the drinks sublime.
Ahot Toddy ($4.25) — honey, lemon, star anise — is a go-to on a drizzly day, the men say. And for stuffy noses. But the black teas are the best coffee-substitutes.
Black Velvet ($4.95) is one of my favourites. Full bodied and creamy, it’s a cup of throat-stinging cinnamon, cloves and star anise that finishes with the spicy sweetness of dark chocolate.
The Tiger Latte ($4.25) looks like it sounds with a swirl of orange through a foamy milk top. This drink transforms matcha into liquid caramel.
The Coconut Cream ($4.10) turns oolong on its head with a milky tickle of lemongrass, which Barwani describes as “dessert in a cup.”
Of course, it also makes a nice breakfast. Eaten something you’d like to see on Sourced? Email mhenry@thestar.ca.