I walked past the main door of the shop three times without seeing it, and it was only on my third pass that I asked a random shop assistant who pointed out the door behind her.Tea Bone Zen Mind occupies the top two floors of a shophouse on Seah Street facing the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. The decor is a mix of western sofas and Zen-style art and flower arrangements. While visually very buddhist, there are in fact prayer cards for St. Josemaría Escrivá scattered around the shop.
We were offered a cup of light green tea (on this occasion, Four Seasons å››å£æ˜¥) as soon as we sat down, which was very welcome. We only tried the teas from China and Taiwan (they also carry Indian and Ceylonese teas) and the standard seemed to be uniformly high. Particularly stunning was the Dayuling (大禹嶺), which tasted like a light chicken broth. Dayuling is a Taiwanese tea, and one of the priciest at that shop (SGD28 for a single infusion, SGD85 for a 50g packet of leaves). The winter tea (冬茶) was an expensive disappointment: the leaves were limp and lifeless and the tea tasted of nothing much. Our friend Alice tells us that a tiny amount of winter tea is available every year, but that the delicate fragrance fades exceedly rapidly, perhaps within a week or two. Now being January, and the leaves likely plucked in December, her opinion was that we were optimistic to taste anything other than boiled water. Oh well, that is a lesson learnt.茶骨禪心 Tea Bone Zen Mind
38A Seah Street
Singapore 188394
Tel: +65 63344212
