Where to Eat: New York City
The city is overflowing with options for a warm pot and small bites that won’t empty your bank account.
Since October, I’ve been on a creepy TV show run. I zoomed through both seasons of “The Devil’s Hour” on Amazon Prime, and I’m rewatching the vampire thriller “The Strain” on Hulu. Completing the trio of creepy watches is “From,” a supernatural drama on MGM+ about a strange town overrun by monsters and other weird phenomena.
The situation in “From” is perpetually bleak, but no matter how bad things get Mrs. Liu, who runs the town’s diner, always believes that tea will solve it. You’re hearing voices? Tea. Monsters attacked your house? Tea. Something about the ritual of sipping tea seems like a panacea, even if it’s only a temporary one.
This led me on a journey to revel in a bit of afternoon tea, a ritual that consists of two key elements: Your own pot of tea and a multilevel display of finger foods. Prices can vary wildly, from the cost of two movie tickets to a few hundred dollars. Here are a few options from the affordable to the fancy.
A nontraditional DIY option
Though it’s not a true afternoon tea, you can get pretty close to the real thing by snatching a table at the cozy West Village location of Te Company, where you can enjoy tea by the pot or by the $43 flight — I went for the Oriental Beauty, Wild Chrysanthemum and Formosa Dragon teas — over deftly executed desserts. The pineapple linzer cookie is the cafe’s most popular offering, but if I were to do it all again, I’d just order several slices of the impossibly moist pineapple cake, two scallion biscuits with tiny dried shrimp and the crumbly shortbread cookies. If there’s a bit of a wait, pop into the Three Lives & Company bookstore across the street. You might find something to read over tea.
163 West Tenth Street (Seventh Avenue South)
An influencer tea for normies
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