Tea's Me Cafe

Tamika Catchings spent her whole WNBA career with the Indiana Fever, won four Olympic gold medals and entered the Basketball Hall of Fame; in 2017, a year after retiring, she bought a small Indianapolis tea shop called Tea's Me rather than leave the city. The premise she has run it on since is that a tea room can do the civic work a bar does — somewhere to sit for two hours, meet people and be a regular — without alcohol anywhere in the building. She has also used it deliberately as an employer, hiring high-schoolers into first jobs, and has rotated a new local artist onto the walls every month. In 2023 she put a bottled Tea's Me line into grocery stores across central Indiana.

The tea itself is loose-leaf and sourced widely: Vanilla Rooibos and Honeybush on the herbal side, a Sparkling Wine herbal infusion, Earl Grey among the blacks, Japanese Cherry in the greens, and Raspberry Champagne among the whites, plus espresso drinks and a short menu that covers breakfast, lunch and dessert with vegetarian options throughout. Be aware that the business has contracted hard this year. The original café at 140 East 22nd Street has closed, and on 23 July 2026 Catchings announced by video that the Tea's Me Community Cafe at Tarkington Park would shut after five years; it served its last day on 1 August 2026. She was explicit that the company is not winding up, and that it is consolidating onto the IU Indianapolis location on University Boulevard. That is a campus café with campus hours — Tuesday to Thursday from 8am, Friday from 10am, closed at weekends — so check before making a trip across town. The consolidation is worth understanding rather than glossing, because it changes what this entry is for. Tea's Me at Tarkington Park was a genuine third place, sited beside a basketball court, a splash pad and an amphitheatre, and its closure removes one of the few alcohol-free community rooms on the near north side. What survives is smaller and more specific: a well-run, fully alcohol-free tea counter inside the IU Indianapolis campus centre, open weekday daytimes, with the same loose-leaf program and the same bottled range on the shelf. For a visitor it is a good stop if you are already downtown or on campus, and not worth a special journey; for the tea itself, the bottled line is stocked in grocery stores across central Indiana.