La Tienda del Té

Mónica Rodríguez opened La Tienda del Té on Roque Graseras street in Montevideo's Pocitos neighborhood in 2010, describing a slow start in a country with no real precedent for the format: "la gente no tenía ni idea de lo que era una tienda de té" — people had no idea what a tea shop even was — and it took months before customers were willing to walk in at all. The business bills itself as Uruguay's first specialized tea shop.

Rodríguez's team responded to that early hesitation with a specific fix: small 25-gram tea packages sized to let a skeptical first-time customer try a tea without committing to a full tin, a format Rodríguez has described as something she hadn't seen offered elsewhere. The early customer base skewed toward young Uruguayans who had encountered specialty tea abroad and were looking for it back home — a demographic the shop has kept targeting since. Rodríguez has since pursued formal tea sommelier and tea-master training, with the shop's growth accompanied by further tea-sommelier and tea-master study.

Fifteen years on, in a country where mate is the default hot drink, La Tienda del Té has grown from that one uncertain Pocitos storefront to three locations, including counters inside Montevideo's Mercado Agrícola and the Arocena mall — still selling true tea, deliberately distinct from Uruguay's mate culture, to a market that had to be introduced to the idea from scratch.