Camellia Sinensis

Hugo Américi opened the first Camellia Sinensis teahouse on Montreal's Emery Street on November 16, 1998, after a visit to Prague's Dobra Cajovna teahouses the year before convinced him to abandon his original plan for a coffee bar. Two university students who started as servers, Jasmin Desharnais and François Marchand, quickly became co-owners, and Kevin Gascoigne joined the partnership in 2004; the team has been sourcing tea on annual trips to China, Japan, India, Taiwan, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan since 2003.

The company built a tea school alongside its retail business — six three-hour courses by 2002, expanded to more than eighteen by 2012 — and has since opened a second teahouse in Quebec City, a retail counter at Montreal's Marché Jean-Talon, and Bristol Chai, the province's first chai bar. Camellia Sinensis has also published tea reference books that have gone on to win international awards, including World's Best Tea Book in 2014, and in 2018 opened its own Tea Studio in India.

What began as a scrapped coffee-bar concept, reshaped by one visit to a Prague teahouse, grew into a Montreal-based operation running its own school, its own India-based tea studio, and award-winning published research on tea itself.