What Tea Drunk is known for
Shunan Teng grew up in a family of tea drinkers in China, moved to the US at fifteen, and spent years in corporate finance in New York before a trip home convinced her that the city's tea renaissance had nowhere to land in Manhattan.
Shunan Teng grew up in a family of tea drinkers in China, moved to the US at fifteen, and spent years in corporate finance in New York before a trip home convinced her that the city's tea renaissance had nowhere to land in Manhattan. She opened Tea Drunk's East Village flagship in 2013, built around the idea that tea deserved the same connoisseurship as wine.
Teng travels to China's historic tea mountains most years, working alongside heritage farmers on the harvest and production itself rather than buying finished lots sight unseen. That fieldwork has carried her well outside her own shop — she collaborated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a temporary Chinese tea house installation and wrote the TED-Ed lesson on the history of tea.
Few New York tea rooms are run by someone who spends part of each year actually harvesting alongside the farmers whose leaves end up in the cup — Tea Drunk's East Village space is built directly on that fieldwork.
Best for — Rare Chinese teas sourced through the founder's own annual harvest
USA
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Hand-curated for ORBIS — official entity link on record · no paid placement
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