Why it belongs in ORBIS
Elena Liao, who moved to the US from Taiwan at thirteen, founded Té Company in 2011 with a narrow, deliberate focus: Taiwanese oolong, a category she felt was invisible in an American market dominated by grocery-store tea bags.
Elena Liao, who moved to the US from Taiwan at thirteen, founded Té Company in 2011 with a narrow, deliberate focus: Taiwanese oolong, a category she felt was invisible in an American market dominated by grocery-store tea bags. The business began by wholesaling to New York fine-dining restaurants before her husband, Frederico Ribeiro — a former sous chef at Per Se — joined as a partner and helped the company pivot to retail, opening its first tea shop in the West Village in 2015.
Té sources directly from small Taiwanese farmers, building the kind of relationships that let the shop stock selections comparable to what's available in Taiwan's own specialty tea shops. Ribeiro's kitchen background shows up in the pairings: the house makes its own Pineapple Linzer cookies, a reworking of the classic Taiwanese pineapple cake, built specifically to go with the oolongs.
A fine-dining wholesaler that became a West Village retailer, still built around one founder's home region and one narrow, deeply sourced category of tea.