SPOTLIGHT: The Perennial Tea Room
In March 2024, I had the opportunity to visit with Aliya Cacanindin, one of the “tea slingers” at the Perennial Tea Room in Seattle, WA (Aliya, Mikaela, Tayler, and the proprietor Dolan Honsa are all like vested co-managers at the store). Nestled in a Pike Place alleyway right behind “The World’s First Starbucks,” the Perennial Tea Room caters to locals as well as tourists, passersby, and online customers throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The shop, founded in 1990, specializes in giving customers a personalized experience in choosing the best teas to suit their tastes, while offering customized advice and information about their teas from farm to cup. As such, an in-person consultation will always be worthwhile, though their website is also very informative and easy to navigate (https://perennialtearoom.com/). The Perennial Tea Room features over 100 types of tea (including rotating seasonal varieties), teapots, cups (including works by local artists), infusers, and other accessories, as well as snack foods and tea-related books.
The Perennial Tea Room serves as a community resource. Aliya was quick to mention that Pike Place is not just a tourist center, but a truly local Farmer’s Market where residents of Seattle and outlying areas come to shop. She and the other tea slingers at Perennial have helped countless customers get started with their daily tea ritual, and have they have also guided many an experienced tea lover to explore new and unexpected blends from far corners of the world. They serve as a gateway, emphasizing accessibility in the process of cultivating a long-lasting relationship with tea as an everyday luxury. While they can give detailed answers to queries about how to prepare any particular tea, one of their guiding principles on the “best” way to brew tea is: “If you like it, you’re doing it right.” Another admirable stance is that it is less important that customers come in to buy tea and more important that customers leave having learned something that makes them even more of a tea enthusiast. The Perennial Tea Room even provides a list of many of the tea shops in the Seattle area, attesting to the communal support of tea businesses there.
The shop has their many teas organized by type all along two walls. Laminated lists provide some guidance to tea selection, with the knowledgeable employees all collaborating on the tasting notes and sourcing information. Prior to the COVID pandemic, smelling sample jars of several teas were openly on display, but, says Aliya, smells were often deceiving: quality unflavored teas often don’t have impressive aromas, and flavored teas can have an overwhelming perfume that doesn’t translate into taste, leaving customers disappointed.
What teas they carry is part of curating process that necessarily entails compromise. Not many are willing to pay more than the Nepali White they carry at $14/oz., and with overhead costs, it is similarly not practicable to carry many lower grade teas that are less than $4/oz. That said, they carefully select a range and variety that can cater to all tastes, and buyers can be confident that the teas are all ones that the employees think give you excellent bang for the buck. When I was there, I sampled an excellent Yabukita Oolong from Kyoto, Japan. Japan is mostly known for green teas, so this rare oolong was a treat. It had a mellow grassiness and tasted like a hybrid green/oolong, which makes sense when you learn about its processing. Another of my favorites was Mountain Morning, a bold Assam black tea with notes of chestnut.
Like the GTI, the Perennial Tea Room’s mission is to educate and increase the connoisseurship of tea. If you are the Seattle area, and especially if you go to Pike Place, don’t just visit the “First Starbucks”—be sure to walk a block up to 1910 Post Alley and visit the Perennial Tea Room!
Perennial Tea Room
1910 Post Alley, Seattle WA
Open daily 9:30-5:00