GET THIS:Paris's most celebrated salon du thé is one to remember Buying tea
TEA DRINKING BEGS ceremony. A bag in a mug may just about do first thing in the morning, but only just. Last week, I sat in Mariage Frères in Paris, cocooned in what must be one of the coolest dining rooms in Paris. Tea, French-style, involved a white uniformed tea person who did the brewing up, a dramatic, dark-haired madam in the cash kiosk (who turned out to be an American student, frighteningly similar in appearance to the dark-haired Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction), and a manager, clad in a Raj-style linen suit, keeping order over proceedings. I studied the tea menu, which ran over pages.
Would it be Peace Mountain tea from Thailand; Yin Zhen, which is a white tea picked on only two days in the year, and which has a subtle fresh flavour from the crystalline, pale mandarin liquor; or my own choice, the intriguingly named Opium Hill, which indeed is grown where poppies formerly flowered, and which was an elegant, flowery tea with a peony fragrance?
For the cost of €11, a large white pot with metal cover arrived to match the white cup on the table. Exquisite minimalism.
For all the bags, strainers and ceremony that surrounds tea, one fact remains: if you leave tea in contact with water it progressively draws out tannins and eventually makes the liquor (not brew) pretty undrinkable. In Mariage Frères, the man who makes the tea controls the temperature of the water (critical) and the contact time, which is different for different teas.
This all takes time, which is an important part of the process. As you gaze about, however, you realise the room is full of tea paraphernalia. Tea pots, tea cups, tea caddies, tea sacks, boxes of tea, packets of tea, tins of tea. This global gathering is breathtakingly broad, and despite the old-style graphics, curiously modern. Tea is an amazing drink and in French hands it takes on an intriguing style of its own.
When my pot arrives, there is no mistaking the seriousness of purpose here. It is poured and left on the table. The liquor is a pale, green-tinged orange. It paints the side of the cup with a translucent glow, at once warm and refreshing. When I drink it, its inherent wateriness means there is no viscous lingering. It is there and then gone. But what follows is an explosion of sublime pleasure; the scent of flowers, but not quite, an earthiness which is savoury, but almost sweet, a meatiness you want to capture, but cannot.
And so you sip again and repeat the process. Except this time, things are not quite the same. You know what to expect and so, like riding waves, you anticipate. But still there is surprise, still delight, as the flavours come forward and draw back in a different way.
As the tea cools, so the flavours start to mellow, but you can top up from the pot as you like. This is a rather crucial aspect to tea drinking and why it is so nice to be left alone. Half an hour later, the world seems back on track.
There are several branches of Mariage Frères in Paris, as well as two in Tokyo, and you can buy its tea online.
Buying Tea
Moynihan and Dent (George's Street Arcade, Dublin 2 and various farmers' markets)
Matchabar (www.matchabar.com) has just opened a tea emporium in the Powerscourt Centre in Dublin 2