Muni Muni Tea Shop

Muni Muni sits in a ground-floor suite on Church Street, three blocks up from the Broadway honky-tonks and squarely inside the downtown core, which is what makes it worth knowing about: this stretch of Nashville is overwhelmingly given over to drinking, and there is very little in it that is open in the evening and serves nothing alcoholic. Muni Muni does. The Nashville Downtown Partnership, the business-district organisation that keeps the official downtown directory, lists it as the local downtown tea shop for bubble milk tea, matcha and boba.

The menu rewards reading rather than pointing. Matcha is ceremonial grade and whisked per order, and the flavoured versions are built rather than syruped: the Strawberry Matcha Latte comes with a milk cap and actual strawberry inclusions; the Coconut Matcha Latte uses a house virgin coquito with cinnamon and toasted shredded coconut on top; the Banana Nut Toffee version uses banana milk, a salted banana cream cap and almond toffee bits; there is an Ube Matcha Latte with a house-made ube milk blend. The tea side is brewed to order too - the Muni Muni Milk Tea on earl grey, a roasted oolong milk tea, a mango milk tea on jasmine green, a Lychee Dragon Fruit fruit tea. Two drinks stand out as the ones to order if you want to see what the shop can do: the Hojicha Cheese Einspanner, a first-flush roasted green tea under a generous cheese cap, low in caffeine and built for the end of a day; and Cafe Cha, which layers earl grey and blue mountain coffee over coffee jelly with a milk cap. Tiger sugar milk with tapioca pearls and a bruleed cheese cap covers the classic bubble-tea end.

Nothing on the list contains alcohol. Sizes are 16oz for the matcha builds and 22oz for the teas, and most drinks land between $6 and $8. Hours are 11am to 6pm early in the week, 11am to 7pm on Friday and 10am to 7pm at weekends, so this is an afternoon and early-evening stop rather than a late one - useful before a show at Bridgestone or the Ryman, both a short walk away.