Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
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W hile touring London-area antique shops for wares to bring back to their St. Louis-based home furnishings business, the four-member Richardson clan began hatching a rather novel idea for this side of the pond. "Most of these shops we visited had a tearoom next door, which got us thinking about bringing this concept to St. Louis," says Anna Myers, the youngest of the entrepreneurial Richardson fam- ily, which includes parents Alan and Pat and Anna's older sister, Jackie James. So as the family of British expatriates concocted plans to move their 12-year-old home furnishings and antique business from the outskirts of St. Louis into the city's Loft District—a resurgent area on the edge of downtown—they simultaneously fashioned plans to open an adjacent tea shop. Such begins the tale of the London Tea Room, a five-year-old establishment that has injected the "Rome of the West" with a much-needed spark of tea-sipping, note-savoring enthusiasm and has captured a steady stream of loyal customers. BREAKING PERCEPTION As the Richardsons began crafting plans for their antique shop and tearoom, the family found inspiration in the popular J. Lyons & Co. tea shops of wartime England. A late-19th-century version of Starbucks, the Lyons Teashops lost favor in the post-war era as incomes dropped and coffeehouses emerged. "The Lyons tea shops were big, open spaces with lots of black-and-white colors and well-presented waitresses," Myers says. "That was an inspira- tion for us and a concept of the past that we gravitated toward." 54 Tea Almanac 2013 Unlike the traditional image of tearooms, the space favored by the Richardsons had a hipper, urban feel. Characteristic of its neighbors in the Loft District, the 1,800-square-foot former ware- house boasts high ceilings, oversized windows, hardwood floors, intense green walls and white marble tables with black café chairs. Merchandise, including teapots and tea accessories, peppers the space. "Some people want that familiar, traditional experience, but we wanted to break that perception and create a spot that we would want to frequent," Myers says. And as Myers, who has a background in wine, began to understand the intricacies of the tea world, the London Tea Room concept sprouted into something well beyond the family's initial plans: The shop doubled its intended space and added staff positions. "The more we learned about tea, the more eager we were to know more," says Myers, who runs the shop's daily operations alongside her sister. "We got excited about impart- ing this to people." MEET TEA IN ST. LOUIS When the store opened in May 2007, Myers and James urged people to suspend built-up aversions to tea. "When you'd hand people a cup of the right tea—at the right temperature with the right preparation—they were shocked," Myers says. "Over the last five years, introducing people to good tea is the biggest joy we've received." Each month the store hosts one or two interactive and intimate tea education classes that offer guests an inside look at basic dif- ferences between teas. And two or three times each month, the