Pillion Tea

Pillion Tea is a fully alcohol-free tea house at 42 W Biddle Street in Mid-Town Belvedere, and its name is the first clue to what makes it unusual: a pillion is the seat behind the rider on a motorcycle. Co-owners Zena Lichter and Eric Mitchell built the room themselves, pulling up the floors and hand-cutting the tin tiles, and what they landed on is a punk motorcycle aesthetic married to a clean and tranquil tea shop — a combination that sounds contradictory and works. They occasionally organise motorcycle rides for the overlap between local tea drinkers and local riders, which is a smaller Venn diagram than you would think and a real community either way. Lichter's description of what she is running is the useful one: I personally know ninety per cent of the people who come in here by name. Her framing of the drink itself is broader — around the world, she told The Baltimore Banner, tea is how you welcome people into your home.

The tea programme is genuinely deep rather than decorative. Pillion works directly with dozens of producing families around the world and carries close to a hundred teas, of which twenty to thirty are rare — a yellow tea from Dongting Lake in China, purple teas from Kenya, fermented pu-erh — sold loose by weight as well as brewed in the room. Alongside the straight tea it builds a rotating set of named drinks: a seasonal mocktail, a Desert Rose latte, a rooibos cream soda, a hibiscus and rose spritzer, a ginger mint spritz, a blueberry matcha and the Lucky Piña. Nothing here contains alcohol and nothing is infused with anything else. One practical caveat: the shop's website does not render its menu in a readable form, so the current list and the hours are best confirmed by phone or in person rather than online — and given how much of the stock is rare and rotating, asking what has just come in is the right approach anyway.