Pet Peeves: Tea edition

I have a number of pet peeves regarding tea served in restaurants:

- Paying for tea.

I expect tea to be served in a big pot and to be free in an Asian restaurant. Kirin on Alberni sets the example in this regard: First thing as soon as you sit down, they bring out a big pot of freshly brewed, loose-leaf Jasmine tea, on the house, to every table, and from there on out are attentive to promptly refill the pot when the lid is placed askew.

Setting the negative example is Iki on 4th Ave., which aside from being sloppy in both service and preparation (the nori on the maki fell apart at the seams and their Volcano roll was ludicrously overfilled with cream cheese), charged for the tea. And what did they bring out? A white diner coffee mug filled with hot water, and a tea bag. (And you can bet it was the cheapest green tea you can buy at Safeway)

- Wrong vessel.

See above. Coffee mugs are for coffee.

- Wrong tea.

Contrary to what some restaurants might think, it does matter what tea you serve. Chinese restaurants should serve Chinese tea, and Japanese restaurants should serve Japanese tea. I've been to a Chinese restaurant that served black tea when you asked for tea, which strikes me as astonishing. The new restaurant East Fusion in Tinseltown (I'll save you the trouble if you're curious about it: their food is uniformly inedible) brought out black tea.

- Tea bags.

The tea should be loose leaf, not tea bags. There is no quicker way to figure out if a restaurant has a global attitude of disregard for quality than seeing if they bring out a tea bag in a mug of hot water.

- Watered down tea.

Nothing is more annoying than taking a sip of tea and not being able to tell if it's tea or hot water. Kitsaya on West Broadway sets the example in this regard: They brought out a cup of tea so scaldingly hot that I was unable to taste anything for 15 minutes because my tongue was burned. Try as I might to sense the flavor of the beverage I was served, each sip seemed tasteless. By the end of the meal, the "tea" now cool enough to taste, I could tell that the tea had been so watered down as to have nary a particle of tea left. This restaurant has discovered that as long as you serve it hot enough, you can serve hot water instead of tea and nobody will notice the difference. In my previous post on Chongqing Robson, I mentioned that they, too, are guilty of the sin of serving tea watered down to such an extent as to have no flavor.