The Samovar Tea Lounge, on the corner of Page and Laguna, is basically what its name would suggest, a place where you sit and drink tea. Like drinking tea in your apartment if your apartment was decorated from Pottery Barn’s Zen page, and you charged your roommates $8 a pot. They wouldn’t pay of course, but your roommates are cheap, and this article isn’t about them or you. It’s about Pottery Barn, if Pottery Barn was another word for tea.
Did you know that warm water hydrates you better than cold? Did you know that cold water is actually bad for your body? These are the kind of things people will tell you if you go to a tea lounge. People who love tea are like people who love wine except less drunk, and Samovar, with its relaxing atmosphere and nonalcoholic beverages, is a nice place to go if you are looking to get together with a friend after work, but not looking to throw up near them.
Tea is like the opposite of pizza and sex: even when it’s great it’s not that greatSamovar sits kitty corner to a Zen center. This is great, because if you’ve ever heard of a contact high you know that you don’t actually have to be meditating in order to reap its benefits. If someone meditates in a forest and no one sees them except you can you tell your friends that it was actually you who was meditating in the forest? If you haven’t asked yourself this question after a trip to the tea lounge then you’re not thinking about meditation enough.
The food is a pretty good argument for food, and appears incredibly fresh and almost certainly extremely organic. The assorted cookie plate ($5) is tasty if a little difficult to eat without spewing crumbs all over your companion. The tea descriptions alone are worth the trip, although the difference between vibrant descriptions of tea and actual tea is like the difference between looking at a wall and realizing you can walk through them, only the other way around.
The tea at Samovar is probably quite good, but even after you drink it you still don’t know if it was good, because tea is like the opposite of pizza and sex: even when it’s great it’s not that great. There’s just so much water involved. Some day a genius will come up with highly concentrated tea shots that get you crazy drunk, but until then there’s always vodka.
