Our First Tea Party

In October 2007, we were kindly invited to put together a tea menu for a one-off event at the Nile Lounge Hookah Bar in Allston, MA. The event was hosted by our friends at Yelp and gave us our first shot at being tea hosts.

Ligaya, the Yelp community manager for Boston, joined us at our favorite tea store - Tea Zone - to pick out a unique combination of teas that would go well with fruity hookahs and give our crowd plenty to talk about. With the help of the always brilliant staff, we sniffed and sniffed until we'd narrowed it down the exotic Vanilla Rooibos, the nose-buster Organic Jasmine Green Tea and the luxurious Cream Earl Grey. But what about an Oolong and what about a mint tea to go with the hookah lounge vibe? Well, the first one was already taken care of - Tom's sister had come up trumps with a gift of real monkey-picked tea that was too good not to share - and the second, the mint tea, gave us a chance to experiment... we mixed up our very own blend of peppermint, chrysanthemum and lemon grass and christened it Pharaoh of Boston tea.

A few days later we sat down with our selection, put on our best thinking caps and moistened our taste-buds - it was time to write up the menu. This was not as easy as it sounds. Tea Zone had given us tasting notes but we wanted to be original and write what we got out of the teas, not what we were supposed to get. In the end, we struggled through and were happy with our words. It's difficult to both decide on the exact description of the taste and aroma of a few boiled leaves, but when you have something down that you agree on, it's a geekily proud moment.

What we came up with is on this site!... Tea menu at Nile Lounge

So, on to the event...
The Nile Hookah Lounge was a great spot for this. We brought along 5 teapots - one for each tea - and these were filled with piping hot tea and left on the 5 tables for the Yelp guests to help themselves to. Despite the abundance of excellent free Tiger beer, the tea was lapped up by the crowd with such gusto that Nile had to pull out their reserve tea cups. Tom and the Nile staff worked behind the scenes to boil up vats of hot water and keep the teapots and their bagged treasures as full as possible.


The Yelp mint blend and the monkey-picked tea were great talking points but it was the Cream Earl Grey and the Jasmine Green Tea that were the big hits and stole the show. Seems like the crowd have good taste, we loved these too.

The event itself was a huge bag of fun. The Nile Lounge is really worth checking out, especially as we left behind huge quantities of our teas with them to serve for the next month or so. Their hookahs are excellent and sipping a tea with one whilst watching one of the talented locals perform is a great evening in anyone's book.

More Events Pictures:





















-- You can see Yelp's take on the event at their blog here.

-- And please also visit Tea Zone's blog too to learn about tea.

-- Finally - check out the glowing reviews for the whole evening by other Yelp members too here...