Dobra Tea

Dobrá Tea is a Bohemian-style tea house at 1937 Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill, established in 2012 by the Society of Tea Devotees, the Czech tea collective whose rooms run across Central Europe and a handful of American cities. Its own description of what it is trying to be is the best line anyone has written about it: a space somewhere between a bar and a church, a place for relaxation and community. That is not a throwaway — it is the operating principle, and it explains why the room works for the purpose most alcohol-free venues struggle with. You can sit here for three hours. Nobody will hurry you, the lighting is low, there are cushions and low tables, and the whole design assumes you came to stay rather than to be turned over. Nathaniel Pantalone owns it. It opens late for a tea house — until 10pm on weeknights and 11pm on Friday and Saturday — which is precisely the window when a non-drinker in Pittsburgh runs out of options.

The list is not a mocktail menu and does not pretend to be. It is tea, over a hundred of them, ordered by category the way a wine list is ordered by region: green, black, oolong, white, yellow and pu'er, then the house blends it calls Specialteas, then tisanes, yerba maté and an iced range. The Specialteas are where its character sits, and they are named like postcards — Memories of Prague, a black tea with chocolate; Taste of Kashmir, an oolong with spices; Sweet Smell of Jerusalem, black tea with cinnamon; Touareg, the Moroccan mint; and four different chais including a minty Kerala and a chocolate Bombay. One item deserves singling out for anyone who misses the ritual more than the alcohol: Staroborshov, listed among the iced teas, is a chilled tea served as a "beer" — a genuine old Czech tea-house tradition rather than a novelty, and about as close as a soft drink gets to the shape of the thing it replaces. Food is mezze-leaning and mostly vegetarian. One limitation: no prices are published online.