Tea Zaanti Interview
teazaanti.com
IG: @teazaanti
Scott and Becky Lyttle are the husband and wife team that own Tea Zaanti, a locals favorite tea shop located in the heart of Sugarhouse at 1944 1100 E. Recently, I got to sit down with Becky on the shop’s fabulous front patio and find out a little more about what makes Tea Zaanti so special.
Tea Zaanti’s menu is filled with teas, drinks, bites and treats. They also do catering.
Hours: 10:00am - 5:00pm Tuesday-Wednesday
10:00am - 9:00pm Thursday-Saturday
11:00am - 5:00pm Sunday
Chad: How did the Tea Zaanti story originate?
Becky: My husband Scott always wanted his own Cafe business. I said, I don't want deep fryers. I don't want a lot of staff and it can't cost us millions of dollars. About four years ago, he came across a listing for a tea shop that was for sale. He spent some time in there, saw it was just a single guy running the show. Scott was like, “I could do this”. The price was super reasonable and we both happen to be tea drinkers, always have been so it was a natural thing and it just kind of grew from there!
Chad: What is your go-to tea to drink?
Becky: Historically, Scott was a Stash Tea decaf Earl Grey guy and I was a Tazo Chai Tea in the bag girl. We would order them like boxes of a hundred, we knew nothing really about the loose leaf tea game until we bought the shop. I always grew up drinking my tea with milk and honey. So I always leaned towards black teas with milk and honey.
Tea is kind of like wine, the more you know, the more you explore and then you start to experiment tasting the true essence of the tea. Now we’ve totally morphed our habits. Scott loves his green tea and starts almost every day with a good green tea. He has Oolong most afternoons. He drinks black tea very rarely and he doesn't drink decaf anymore. I dabble all around, it depends what I'm in the mood for. I still love a good chai tea but there are some really interesting greens out there. Probably at least once a week I have our Hojicha, which is a roasted green tea, or our Genmaicha, which has puffed rice in it that kind of gives it a warming flavor. It just depends on the day when you catch me, am I feeling hot or cold? Do I want something really sweet? Do I want it with milk? I would say I discovered Matcha, which is a powdered green tea, since we bought the shop and now I drink it several times a week.
Chad: What is the hardest part about doing business during COVID?
Becky: I think part of why we got into small business is we were both excited about the ability to build relationships, really be a part of the community, and educate and introduce people to new things. And you certainly lose some of that. For example, we have our teaser shelf with 85 types of tea, where we’d invite people to open up the canisters and smell the teas.
We are used to pulling a jar down behind the counter and showing them to a customer and you've lost a little bit of that. I think Scott would probably say the most challenging aspect has just been not being the vibrant busy place that we had envisioned when we relocated to SugarHouse. We finished the remodel and reopened the doors four days before the restaurants were mandated to shut down.
Chad: what makes Tea Zaanti unique?
Becky: It's the whole concept. We built what we felt like Salt Lake was missing. When we reopened in our new Sugarhouse location, we got our restaurant license and we can now serve wine and beer. We've often craved a place like this, where we can go out for a drink but not sit in a bar or a fancy restaurant and take valuable table space from a server. So we added wine as a great complement to tea. They both come from terroir — where they're grown and how they’re processed affects the flavor. So we felt like it was a really fun pairing and contrast you can come here to enjoy. You can have a baby shower here or you can come with your LDS or other friends that aren't drinking and everybody can kind of have a fun and unique and special experience.
Chad: what's your cocktail of choice?
Becky: Our house is always well supplied with gin martinis and the fixings to make Manhattans. Ironically, I was not a whiskey drinker before COVID but I've since developed quite the taste! With my gin martinis I don't like olives, so I use pickled green tomatoes instead. In the summer, nothing beats a bottle of Rose!
Chad: Any tea cocktails you’ve discovered?
Becky: Well, I think it’s probably the Tea-mosa. Think of a traditional mimosa but made with tea instead of juice. You have the obvious combinations, we started with raspberry which tastes like a raspberry Rose. When you feel like something bubbly, we found that the natural sugars in the champagne really bring out the flavors in the tea. It's a good balance, we started just playing with teas and thinking about what else would go with champagne. Apricot is lovely and most fruits pair really nicely. We made one with lavender gray, which is Earl Grey tea with lavender petals and Bergamot! I don't think there's a bad combination that really surprised us. We started realizing that almost any flavor goes really nicely and it's refreshing with no sugar and it's fun to do. If you're doing a shower or barbecue in your backyard you can fit up like an iced tea buffet with just a couple of buckets of bubbly and have people mix and match their tea and booze.
Chad: What do you like to do for fun?
Becky: We do a lot of running, we have two dogs and one is a Viszla that we have to keep running. We're avid eaters and drinkers. We are foodies, we drink a lot of wine and we cook a lot of food. We like to ski, last year we went to Japan to visit our tea suppliers and we thought we might as well mix this and have it be a tea and ski trip, it was great! We spent the first week exploring the tea country of Japan. We met the producers who supply our Matcha and they toured us through their brand new factory and showed us how they make it which is really cool. Then they drove us through the different fields of tea plantations which was awesome. We saw Japan's oldest tea bush which is like 400 years old.
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