I once went down on a mango. (Hey, how’s it going?)
So when I stopped into Chado Tea Room the other day after shopping on the West Side and noticed a dusted gold metal tube of tea titled, simply, “Mango Tea”, I just about had an orgasm. I gazed down at the beautiful thing, tipped the freshly-filled canister and sssssuck… extracted the lid from it’s base to have a whiff.
Now, maybe it’s just all those years of obsessing over Monty Python and the Earl Grey tea I first learned to love in “England” (Epcot center), but I go banana-cakes over a good, flavored black tea. So when I stood there, slowly lifting the open tea-tin to my waiting nose, I broke myself in half. Forget climaxing, I just about had a baby. The pungent, sweet pungent-y goodness, swept up the canister and into my sinuses in a flash. Like a gold-tinted version of Haku the river God from Spirited Away, it shimmered up my nostrils and killed me…sweet heady ambrosia let me die here in peace. “La Petite Mort” and all that. Ya, I found it. So I shelled out the $10 for a 4 oz. canister and clutched it to my chest like a drug as I stumbled out the door.
God I love tea.
Now I’ve been to my fair share of tea rooms, in Los Angeles and elsewhere, and the best thing about Chado Tea Room is that they have approximately 300 versions of this love story for sale, from green to gold, white, black, herb and oolong, from any country that even thinks about selling the heavenly stuff. We’re talking bona fide tea lovers here. You can buy it loose leaf from their adjoining store, or by the pot in their lovely, understated tea room. They also serve incorrigibly sexy tea sandwiches, like the “Souchong Chicken Salad Sandwich” with cranberry/lingonberry sauce and a hint of Lapsang Souchong tea, (my favorite), as well as the BEST TOMATO SOUP EVER. And for the Anglophile in all of us, you can of course gorge on High Tea with scones and treats at a very reasonable price for two.
We may not all react quite the same to the mango kind, but, tea itself has been the inspiration for centuries of ritual, ceremony, love, indulgence, peace (and, well, Westerners fucking things up as usual. Sorry! Had to say it) But truly, it is a wondrous gift to humanity. So when you crave your caffeine with a little more history, go to the Chado Tea Room and remember what the wonderful zen Buddhist master/author Thich Nhat Hanh had to say: “Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.”
That, or go just to get your rocks off.
Chado has stores in Pasadena and on the West Side.
Photo by Al- Fassam [Online! :D] via Flickr
1 response so far ↓
1 Emily // Feb 15, 2008 at 7:05 pm
you have NO idea how I am going to go there tomorrow! i’ve been looking for a tea room for ages!
Leave a Comment