Tea & Poets

Tea & Poets opened in 2016 in Unit 126 of 5701 Sunset Drive, inside the Shops at Sunset Place complex in South Miami, and describes itself as a community space that brings together tea, arts, crafts, poetry and music. The room functions as a cafe by day and a small performance venue by night: the open mic runs on Wednesdays at 7pm and has become the shop's best-known fixture, with visiting and local performers filling the back half of the room. Closing time is 8pm on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, and 10pm on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

What separates Tea & Poets from a standard coffee shop is that the menu is written like a bar list. The dominant section is titled "Tea Cocktails" and carries the word "non-alcoholic" as a subtitle, with every build priced at $5.50 small and $6.50 large. The list includes the Blueberry Mojito (spearmint green tea, fresh lemon, mint and blueberry), the Chocolate Mountain (chocolate syrup, milk, cocoa and chocolate bitters), the Julley Butter Tea (Kashmir chai, whipped butter and brown cane sugar), the Immune Intervention (ginger Ubud, lemon juice, honey and activated charcoal), the Lion's Mane (rooibos red tea and African vanilla), the Blood Orange Basil (English breakfast tea, blood orange bitters, fresh basil, lemon juice and white cane sugar), the Green Tea Lemonade (gunpowder green tea, lemon juice and white cane sugar), the Berry Beautiful (green tea, lemon juice, red berry and white cane sugar), plus a Chai Tea Latte and a Thai Tea Latte. A separate Matcha Life section covers a matcha tea latte, a Choco Matcha, a Matcha Lemonade and a straight matcha shot, and the baristas will build a custom blend from scratch with optional "bumps" of agave, activated charcoal, bitters, citrus, herbs, elderflower or vanilla. One caution worth recording: Google Places currently flags this venue as serving beer and wine, which the published menu does not show, so nothing here should be read as a claim that the premises are entirely alcohol-free.