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Just as kombucha is nothing without tea, the teas we love in Los Angeles and the world over, are nothing without the farmers and producers who’ve often learned the trade through multiple generations. Word on the street is that Yang is looking at spaces in DTLA to increase kombucha production and would include a small tasting window. As long as they continue to source and use quality teas and ingredients, the mind reels at the batches and flavors still to come. Both GT’s Living Foods (Beverly Hills) and Health-Ade (Torrance) have their headquarters here. You can now buy and drink hard kombuchas everywhere from Banc of California Stadium to the Hollywood Bowl. Ojai’s Flying Embers has a tap house in DTLA in the ruins of the old Iron Triangle Brewery.
L.A. TACO’s Ultimate Guide to Tea, Boba, & Kombucha in Los Angeles
At UKA, the kaiseki small plates tradition comes to life not only via the considered, interlocal menu but through the experience itself, conveying a delicate and memorable approach to quality, inspiration, and flavor, and engaging all of the senses along the way. It’s an homage to the beauty of Japanese culinary culture and its many facets and a voyage through its timeless customs. On March 12, 2024, UKA was announced by the prestigious MICHELIN Guide to be chosen as one of the new additions to the 2024 MICHELIN Guide California selection. The spout of the cup is designed so you get a little cheese and a little tea in every sip on one side and slurp up the boba balls through a straw on the other side.
Shabu Shabu x Kaiseki Experience
From Angeles National Forest to the trails winding through the Verdugos to the beaches that hug the coastline and all the backyards, rooftops and front porches in between, it’s a city meant to be enjoyed outside. Today we find healthy dollops of sweet when we consider the journey behind us. Fifteen years of moves, of forging strong partnerships with tea farmers around the world, of understanding what consumers desire in tea and of educating guests about tea's myriad mysteries and joys.
Meet the Chefs
The set up for Japanese loose-leaf genmaicha is all glass, including the glass pot with a tightly coiled metal strainer that prevents any of the tiny bits of leaf from winding up in your cup and compromising your brew. These details might seem over-the-top, but many in the tea world believe that if you don’t serve your tea with the care it deserves, you are essentially disrespecting the farmer who labored to grow it and the natural world where it was grown. Most importantly, not using a one-size-fits-all approach to serving tea is the difference between a delicious tea and what Lu Yu, the oldest tea scribe, described as the ‘swill of gutters’ way back in the 8th century. You don’t need to know any of this to cruise over to Pasadena and walk into Denong’s spacious tea room, where you can sample teas—Jeffery is particularly good at explaining some of the nuances for newbies and experienced drinkers alike. On the one hand, it’s a Downtown Los Angeles warehouse party for people who’ve grown tired of warehouse parties. It re-imagines the ‘idea of what nightlife can be by designing environments that lightly touch upon all the senses.’ On the other hand, it honors the traditional function of a tea house as a place to gather and spend some time in thought, creative expression, or conversation.
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We carry 100+ tea varieties from around the world, with friendly, knowledgeable staff ready to guide you through this exciting world. Joimo’s origin story comes from Chris’s adventures into homebrewing it. His enthusiasm for experimenting with seasonal fruits is unrelenting. At Yang’s, customers have enjoyed nectarine, mango-guava, apricot, and pineapple tepache kombucha, with all the ingredients sourced from the same top-notch farms where Yang’s arms their kitchen. Popping up on seemingly every “Best of Los Angeles” restaurant list since its opening in 2019, there are enough reasons to visit Yang’s Kitchen in Alhambra for what’s on the plate alone. Yet you’ve not fully enjoyed the famed cornmeal mochi pancake until you’ve washed it down with the specialty oolong fresca, nor have you experienced the ethereal crunch of the homemade hash brown brick until you’ve paired it with a seasonal kombucha.
We Champion Bitter, Because Without It There's No Sweet
Like Imen at Tea Habitat, Tea Master always has a fresh stock of new green teas (shincha) in spring and early summer that will astonish even those who are new to tea. Like Sushi Gen across the parking lot in Honda Plaza, it would be hard to find better traditional options outside of Japan. Visit Tea Master before or after you have the best sushi in Los Angeles and continue to stay stocked at home by ordering teas online. This kombucha injected the essence of an exquisitely well-brewed white tea into a burst of lightly bubbly soothing refreshment cool enough to chill out the most brutal of Southern California summer days. Fine Feathers offers a solid regular flavor roster—from lemongrass oolong to sencha guyasa to jasmine peony—as well as seasonal and rotating flavors (Terrance told me he was dreaming up a dragon needle which would combine dragon fruit and white needle).
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It may be a massive company—complete with its own corporate and franchisee squabbles—but when it comes to boba manufacturing, few can match Xing Fu Tang’s process. Their brown sugar boba is flattened, folded, sliced, tossed, and caramelized right there in front of you. By the time the warm gooey lumps travel up your straw, mixing with the icy milkiness of your chosen tea, you understand that not all boba is the same. I’ve visited tea farms in Yame, Sichuan, Yunnan, West Lake, and Darjeeling. Weighed the experiences at Sakurai, Gen Gen An, Higashiya, and Tokyo Saryo against New York’s Kettl.
Still, among all these many options, it is a small-batch brewery in Long Beach that deserves the distinction as the best kombucha in town. COVID has meant their Pasadena store and tastings have been open/closed at different times, so be sure to contact them in advance of a visit, but if you are curious about pu’erh, there are probably very few places outside of East Asia where you can explore the breadth of what you can here. The higher price tag for tastings or products is still a fraction of what you’d pay at a high-end liquor or wine producer—and all of their goods are available online.
UKA Elevating the Art of Kaiseki
I still use my Podstakannik, purchased on the long train ride from Yekaterinburg to Moscow, as well as a tea strainer I managed to locate in desperate months spent in the coffee holy land of Medellín. I also have significant experience shepherding fellow Angelenos safely into the tea world, having spent the final segment of my 100+ episode L.A. Fútbol and culture podcast serving my guests the best teas our city offers. It’s a shame, too, because if it still existed, it would have been at the top of this list. Like all beverages that draw obsessives and poets, tea—whether gongfu style, mugged, cold-brewed, with boba, or fermented in a kombucha—is a drink that links us to the natural world.
Since 2016, Yoshan has been selling Taiwanese oolongs out of Arcadia with a medium-sized, showroom-style “Tea House” where you can sit and sample their teas. While Yoshan offers a lot of the more modern lightly roasted oolongs and high-mountain teas from Lishan and Alishan—often made with the famously milky-fragrant cultivar Jin Xuan—its specialty is Dong Ding oolong. You’ll see Dong Ding translated into English as many things from “snow peak” to “frozen summit,” but the reality is that, like Alishan, Shan Lin Xi, and Lishan, it simply refers to a specific tea growing region in Taiwan. I once drank more than a dozen cups of tea in one Irish-countryside-afternoon simply because I could not decline the offer.
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Still, whether you order the black tea, high mountain oolong tea, or dong ding—many sourced from areas near Taichung and specified down to the county of production—with whatever parameters you prefer, the quality of the tea will stand out. They even have a little prize sticker from the 2021 International Taste Institute in Brussels on every cup to prove it (although if you check online, like I did, there are about 13 pages of teas, many from Taiwan, that made the cut). None of this matters much by the time you have tea in hand and take that first sip.
The truth is that it’s hard to brew great tasting teas in large batches, but they are finding options that strike the right balance between convenience and quality. You are given a tour of the space by Shiloh or one of the other hosts, handed a cup, and allowed as much tea as you’d like during a four-hour window on most Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. These are collectively called the ‘connect’ nights and are evenings for tea and conversations.
The flagship store, which sells premium whole-leaf teas, to-go beverages including boba and matcha drinks and tea accessories, thrives along Boulders main commercial strip, a charming, brick-paved pedestrian promenade lined with shops, restaurants, salons and other businesses. In Tieguanyin, Kioh and his family found something distinct, something that spoke to them. It turned out that the shop he stumbled into was from a 13th generation tea-producing family. Over the next 10 years living in Shanghai, Kioh kept following this initial thread of inspiration into the wider world of traditional Chinese teas.
There is a long display where pu‘erh cakes are presented like dinner plates. There are chests with porcelain and clay tea sets stacked like luggage beneath displays of giant, ornamental Yixing teapot reproductions. There are dozens of loose-leaf tea bins arranged by category and grade.
They also offer some of the loose-leaf teas they use in their kombucha for sale on site, as much an indicator as any that these are brewers who care about what ingredients go into their batches. It’s no wonder then that Fine Feather’s kombuchas provide a balanced, tea-forward probiotic without any of the brutal sour-sock stank that runs afoul of so many big kombucha brands. If you’ve never liked kombucha because of this olfactory violence before, this is the shop that will change your mind. At their main concept store in Taichung, you can do traditional oolong tea tastings and check out their temperature-controlled roof garden where they actually transferred and replanted plants from Li Shan; an area well-known for Taiwanese high mountain oolong teas. If you go straight down the middle though, and order either the Boba Milk Tea or Oolong Milk Tea, it’s impossible not to appreciate what fresh pearls bring to the party. They offer strawberry boba and taro boba, too, but the regular brown sugar is the way to go.
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