Chá Yê

Caio Barbosa and João Campos met in college, but it was Campos's two years living in China, 2009 to 2010, that set the direction: he came home immersed in Chinese tea culture, and the two founded Chá Yê together, opening their first tea house in 2015 on Rua Fradique Coutinho in São Paulo's Pinheiros neighborhood.

The house works directly with growers rather than through importers or brokers, buying small lots from family producers and small farmers the founders know personally — a relationship built on annual sourcing trips back to China's tea-growing regions that the pair have kept up for roughly a decade. Alongside the tea shop, Chá Yê runs its own school, Escola Chá Yê, teaching courses on Chinese tea fundamentals and more specialized single-category deep dives, plus a menu built around Chinese cooking — dim sum, noodles and rice bowls — meant to be eaten alongside the tea rather than instead of a meal.

In a city where most tea retail treats Chinese tea as one category among many, Chá Yê narrows to just that one, run by two founders whose sourcing trips and personal relationships with the growers are the actual backbone of the business, not a marketing line layered on top of it.