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| Gorgeous colonial building houses Lok Cha Teahouse |
Situated inside the Museum of Tea Ware, in Admiralty, it's as if you travelled to an idealistic Chinese teahouse dream. Immaculate wooden furniture, chinese frosted windows and staff dressed in traditional Chinese clothing made me feel as if I was transported from the big metropolis that is Hong Kong to a quaint, quiet countryside location.
I went on Sunday evening and a traditional Chinese trio played classical music while I sipped my tea. This is a regular event for every Saturday and Sunday night and well worth the extra $50 per person price (if you are not ordering the set tea of $80 pp which happens to be pu'er tea that evening). Although the tea was not cheap, as each person has to make one order, the atmosphere was magical. The tea was especially good because it was of very good quality (much better than the tea you get in other big dim sum restaurants). It is served Taiwanese style, in small claypots and thimble-like teacups. The idea is that you pour hot water into the purple clay teapot filled with leaves, let it seep for 2 minutes, pour that into a ceramic jar then serve that into your thimble-cups. You can do this for up to 7 or 10 times, each time the flavour and the fragrance of the tea changes. It's quite a delight. It is important not to let the tea leaves seep for more than 2 minutes as the impurities of the leaves will go into the tea e.g. caffeine, bitter aftertaste. Drank this way, you get all the antioxidant properties (especially from green teas) and none of the ill side-effects.
As for food, they have a small menu of vegetarian dim sum and desserts. I didn't try any so cannot vouch for them this time but this just gives me an excuse to go back.
They also sell very pretty tea ware ranging from affordable to exquisitely expensive.
Tea with performance came to around HKD240 for two.
