You want to talk tea? Then look up Jhanne Jasmine, co-owner of The Tea Zone & Camellia Lounge. Her passion for all things tea – the leafs, the preparation, the history – combined with an open sense of business experimentation has led to one of the most unique businesses the Pearl District has to offer. Tea infused cocktails anyone? Jhanne and I sat outside her cafe recently to discuss the business she and her husband Grant opened up over a decade ago.
Tell me about the origins of The Tea Zone & Camellia Lounge. We’ve been open for 11 years now and we used to live in Boston when we came up with the idea. Both Grant and I come from entrepreneurial backgrounds – our parents owned their own businesses. So I think we just had that entrepreneurial spirit within us. We always wanted to own our own business and we were always coming up with ideas. We spent about two years doing research upon coming up with the idea for Tea Zone – learning as much as we could about tea – and then we decided to act upon this one.
Why tea? It was something that we kind of happened upon – and thought it was a good idea, but never realized how much we would fall in love with it at the time. But there’s something about tea that just touches the spirit. The beverage has a 5000 year-old history. It’s very interesting and there’s so much more diversity in it than coffee. We have 120 loose-leaf teas and there’s all these nuances and differences in the flavors and tastes. It’s almost like talking about wine. You use a lot of the same terminology. It has these ending fruity notes and the palette touches this, and when it hits the back of the throat it hits that. Also, over the years all the health benefits and scientific research that’s been done on the benefits of tea have been very intriguing and have actually helped the business. A lot of people who come in have read an article and want to try different stuff.
Can you expand on the differences between tea and coffee? Coffee is a good jump-start for the morning, but tea really keeps you going a lot longer. It takes a little bit longer – you don’t get an immediate jump from it like you do from coffee, but it stays in your body longer. You don’t crash with tea. And it’s got a lot of vitamins and anti-oxidants and good things that are beneficial as well. And a lot of people are looking for those things right now. It never stopped being interesting. We feel like life long students. We are very fortunate to have gotten to know the leading tea authorities in the country.
How did come upon the idea to do this split café/lounge around tea? It’s kind of a work in progress. It wasn’t the original concept. But as with most businesses, your concept evolves after you open your doors. What we found was that people would come in and ask for food and there was definitely a need for it in this neighborhood. So we started to tackle the food and make that work for us. And we’ve always had some merchandise. We felt if we were going to sell loose-leaf tea that we would have to have a nice selection of the accoutrements for customers to actually do the steeping, brewing of teas. And then the lounge has been open for 3 ½ years now. And that was something where we asked “I wonder if tea would pair well with alcohol?” And so in order to determine if this was a feasible idea or not, we went out and bought a bunch of alcohol and brought in some cocktail books, had all of our staff invite a friend and then everyone was assigned to come up with two good tasting drinks. We were very scientific about it (laughs). We ended up coming up with a list of really good drinks, felt it was a feasible idea and started looking for space. In the end, we got to stay in the same location because some backspace had opened up. So now we have over 70 cocktails that are made with spirits that are infused with tea. A lot of them are based on traditional types. We’ll have a version of our margarita – and since almost all cocktails have some sort of tea element in them we came up with the motto “you get your good with your bad” (laughs).
What’s the Camellia Lounge all about? We have entertainment here Tuesday through Saturday – live bands. Most of the musicians really like playing here. It’s very intimate back in the lounge. Almost feels like they’re standing in a big living room. Very attentive, nice crowds and the lower ceilings help project a warm sound.
What marketing challenges do you face? One of the biggest challenges is still to this day education. It’s not like tea is a part of most Americans lives like it is in other countries. And this goes back to the Boston Tea Party. Americans we’re all tea drinkers up until that time and afterwards became coffee drinkers. Tea fell to the wayside. So a lot of people still have a misconception that tea doesn’t taste good. They think about tea bags – they grew up drinking Lipton. They don’t realize there are so many wonderful options of loose-leaf tea. There are certain things to learn. Your steeping times do matter, water temperatures can matter with green teas and some of the white teas. Tea is still to be discovered by a lot of people.
You’ve got a unique thing going on here. It’s a very unique business – it’s like having four businesses in one. We’ve got the café, the teas themselves, making sure the staff is learning about them, the lounge and entertainment, the merchandise. It’s a very, very complex business. Nobody’s day is ever the same who works here as it can be like in certain coffee shops where they just push a button and do a redundant task over and over. There’s a lot to keep us on our toes.
