specialTEA Lounge & Café

specialTEA Lounge & Café sits in the Columbia Shopping Plaza at 10766 SW 24th Street — Coral Way — in the Westchester area of unincorporated Miami-Dade, a short drive from Florida International University. It has been independently run since June 2009 and describes itself as Miami's original tea lounge. The hours are unusual for a suburban cafe and are the reason it belongs on a list like this one: 8am to 11pm Monday through Friday, 11am to 11pm on Saturday, and 11am to 8pm on Sunday, which gives the neighbourhood a place to sit over a drink well after the shopping plaza has gone quiet.

The menu is organised around four drink programmes. The tea list runs past sixty premium loose-leaf varieties spanning Chinese green tea, Taiwanese oolong, South African rooibos and Indian spiced chai, prepared as hot pots, iced teas, London fogs and tea lattes. The boba programme covers classic tapioca pearls, popping pearls and fruit jellies across more than ten flavours, with taro boba cremes, Thai tea lattes and matcha boba called out by name on the shop's own site. Coffee is USDA organic, fair trade certified and locally roasted, served as French press, cold brew, lattes, mochas and a house drink the shop calls its legendary eye opener. A frozen section covers a matcha freeze, a chilly vanilla chai and coffee-free frozen cremes. Food is limited to breakfast sandwiches, lunch plates and vegan cookies in six flavours. As with several tea lounges in this catalogue, Google Places carries a beer attribute for the venue that the published menu does not support, so this entry stops short of describing the premises as alcohol-free; what is documented is a large, entirely non-alcoholic named drink list running late into the evening. The shop's own telephone number is published in letters — (305) 554-TEAS — and it posts as @specialtealounge. Food is a secondary concern to the drinks: breakfast sandwiches in the morning, a short lunch list, and vegan cookies in six flavours at the counter. The room reads as a study cafe as much as a lounge, and the reason it appears in this catalogue is the combination of a large, entirely non-alcoholic named drink list with hours that run three hours past when most of Westchester has closed for the night.