The first tea bar in Poland just opened. It’s operated by Dilmah, the large Ceylon tea producer.
A welcome addition to Warsaw's café scene.
Located in the centre of Warsaw, Dilmah’s T-Bar is certainly a good addition to the Warsaw café scene. It’s notoriously difficult to get properly brewed tea in his city, in fact, even though (or perhaps because) Poland has one of the very highest per capita consumptions of tea in the world.
T-Bar isn’t really a bar, and it cannot compare to London’s Teasmith that I reviewed here. It is more a tea café, making a case of its tea & food matchings (I’ve yet to try them to really say, although I’m a little worried the same black tea is recommended with sandwiches and chocolate biscuits).
At 2€ per cup, Dilmah's T-Bar is moderately priced by Warsaw standards.
Dilmah is one of the more interesting global brands of tea, with a good record for keeping quality high, and some exciting moves up the quality ladder, including single-estate teas. But it’s no specialist merchant such as Teamasters, Essence of Tea or other small companies I often review on this blog. A large part of the Dilmah range is teabags (and I don’t care if they are state-of-the-art teabags; loose leaf is the only way to go, really) and flavoured tea. Warsaw’s T-Bar is no exception here: there might be 30 teas to sample by the cup but half are flavoured teas…
I steered cleared of the latter and sampled two teas on my visit today: a white silver needle grade from Ceylon, brewed just fine, light, fruity, airy as silver needle should be, with some interesting subtle notes of dried fruits; and an interestingly named Prince of Kandy whose description promised an aromatic high-grown spring flush but which essentially is a commercial light black tea lacking intensity and personality.
Tea at Dilmah's T-Bar in Warsaw is infused as it should.
I’ll be returning here to explore the half-dozen interesting-looking teas in the menu, and because I have little choice anyway if I want a decent cup in Warsaw, but Dilmah’s T-Bar is clearly aimed at a broader public casually interested in tea. Let’s hope it can draw them away from tea bags to the diversity of real tea.
Disclosure
I had tea at Dilmah’s at my own expense.
Nareszcie!
Pozdrowienia z Bordeaux.
In Montreal we call them tea houses. There are a few, and they’re quite small, cozy places where you can often take off your shoes and sit on cushions or armchairs and the like. Some are in a hippie atmosphere, others more upscale. Shishas (hookahs) are common in these types of establishments. One is completely red inside (I don’t know about the colour choice – maybe good for a Rooibos mood). Another one has a gong that is sounded whenever people start talking too loudly. The last one also offers an introductory class on tea and more involved “seminars” on various topics in tea; one can also pay for a tasting session on a type of tea of your choice. It’s all leaf. I sincerely hope more choice develops in Warsaw, which needs all the good vibes it can get.
I like the gong idea
This Dilmah vibe in Warsaw is specificially termed a ‘tea bar’ but I understand a tea bar as focusing more on tasting, and perhaps gongfu brewing, as in the London tea bar I wrote up here. But the Dilmah T-Bar does neither, and it doesn’t even have a bar! Also in the decor and foods it serves, it has nothing Asian about it, so I think more a café than a tea house. Cheers!