Chocolate Mint Tea - David's Tea, Upper East Side

The past weekend I was in Manhattan with friends on a food-splurge.  We ate almost everything under the stars - soup dumplings from Joe's Shanghai,  delicious chocolate from the Bald Man (Max Brenner's), unlimited, delicious breadsticks from Olive Garden; fried pizza from some random restaurant on the West Side, and finally, chocolate mint tea from David's Tea, in the Upper East Side.

Now while the loose-tea community ABHORS Teavana for a plethora of reasons, they don't seem to have any qualms about David's Tea.  In fact, I hadn't even heard of it until we stumbled upon the little storefront.  When you walk inside, you notice the neatly organized, colorful canisters of loose tea arranged on the side walls, and the clean, white walls.  This all screams "modern" to me, and while I like modern restaurants and stores, a tea store should not be modernized.  The art of making tea is an ancient ritual, and modernizing it has taken away some of the feeling that one gets when they brew tea.  Teavana especially has fallen to this, with their exotic "designer" teas, such as their Blackberry Mojito green tea.  For what reason does a good green tea need to be boggled down with disgusting flavors that mask the taste of the tea?  The answer is probably because the tea is of poor quality.

So I ask the woman in David's Tea which is their best selling tea.  She points to a canister on the wall that says "Kiss My Lips."  Now at this point I was wondering if she was trying to initiate something romantic, but I used my better judgement and just opened the canister and smelled the tea.  It smelled of chocolate and mint.  Looking at the actual leaves, I was able to see that it was a black tea, which one might say is not usually...well...MY CUP OF TEA.  There were little red kisses in the leaves that were cute, and gave it some color.  I decided to buy it.

Blogger is not cooperating and won't let me add a photo of the tea, so you'll have to look it up instead!  It's called "Kiss My Lips."  I'm sure Google Images has a picture of the tea leaves.

So I get home and try brewing it.  I tried four minutes because black tea usually brews for a solid four minutes.; I was REALLLLY not in the mood for bitter tea (when IS anyone ever in the mood for bitter tea?).

The tea smells absolutely amazing; in fact, I would probably use it as an air freshener around my house.  Unfortunately, it smells a lot better than it tastes.  It has very little tea flavor, and mostly tastes of chocolate and poor-quality mint.  I finished the tea-pot because I was really in the mood for tea but didn't feel like making another brew, but it was not very enjoyable.  And to top it off, black tea contains a decent amount of caffeine, so I stayed up for an extra hour.

Overall review:

David's Tea Store: Nice looking, the people were helpful.  They didn't have any pure teas though, only "designer" blends.  I wouldn't come here unless I was out of loose-tea and had no other place to get it. 3/5

Chocolate Mint Tea:  Had no taste of tea, only chocolate and mint.  Smells amazing, but isn't really a good tea.  2.5/5

I hope you enjoyed this tea review, hopefully I'll get my hands on some more unique tea and critique it for you soon!  Please comment if you have any recipe suggestions, questions, or ideas!

Signing out,
The Minimalist Chef