San Francisco is My Home

02
Nov

Samovar

Author: kris, Category: Food, Shopping

I go through phases where I love tea. I’m fascinated by the ritual of it (which I learned from a bona fide English friend, so it must be correct): swishing out the pot with boiling water before you add the tea, knowing the proper amount of time to steep, adding the milk before the water, not after. (Wait, is that right? Well who cares, really.)

And this is why I love Samovar, the tea house on 18th and Sanchez that elevates the ritual into a mystic art. The cafe, lined with windows and pillowed wooden benches, is decorated in early White Man’s Buddism, a cornucopia of bamboo screens, statues, and wordy menus that warn you in advance not to complain about the exorbitant prices.

I scanned the menu, with its poetic “it tastes like snow…falling on cedars…” descriptions of each tea, and settled on one that was flavored with espresso and chocolate. Because, to be quite honest, I am not in a tea drinking phase right now and all I really wanted was a cup of coffee and a big, gooey cookie.

“This one sounds like it could be either really great or really awful,” I told my waitress. “What do you think?”

“Oh, it’s really great,” she said convincingly. “It has kind of a woodsy taste, almost an oakish quality. It can be a little bittersweet, but very rich.”

I don’t typically like woodchips in my drinks but I thought I would take a chance and ordered the $8.50 pot.

When it arrived, my waitress — who was really sweet and personable, by the way; the service at this place is top-notch — went through the whole enjoyable ritual of steeping my tea for the proper length of time (in this case, she told me, five seconds) and then pouring it into the tiny cup and then she went away and it tasted…like tea. Which is to say, like slightly flavored bitter water. Not worth $8.50 to my mind, but it’s possible my palate has been destroyed by the three spoons of sugar I stir into my terrible Safeway-brand coffee every morning.

In any case, the tea house is a really enjoyable place to hang out and write for an hour. There are plugs for your laptop under the seats (but no wireless, which is fine by me; who needs the distraction?), the benches are surprisingly comfortable, and despite the Buddhist monastery decor it’s not so quiet you’re afraid to clink your cup around. I did find the music a little distracting: it’s an agreeable mix of French rap, St. Germaine-style funk, Enya, and Tori Amos when she is at her Enya-ist, none of which I have a quarrel with except it’s hard for me to write near music. But it’s a cafe, not a library, so whatever.

I suspect you’d have a better time gastronomically-speaking if you came for a meal; the food looked interesting and is probably made from organic ingredients, whatever that means. It’s a great place to sit for an hour in any case. I give it four stars and a thumbs up.