Bento Box Lunch - Tofu with mustard miso sauce, miso soup, green salad with miso dressing, brown rice and Hijaki seaweed. Vegan coconut rice creamy pudding. Hibiscus Sun herbal tea.

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

At 810 Elmwood Avenue there is a strange building with a staircase in front. The building is the Neighborhood Collective, and there’s an art gallery out back, a graphics gallery upstairs, a jewelry gallery in the front window and…a tea shop. One beautiful afternoon my guest and I fed the meter on Elmwood and climbed those stairs, on a quest for a decent cuppa.

The place is cozy, spacious, eclectic, comfortable, decorated with strange and beautiful things from all over the world, some for sale and some simply for curiosity. A bar extends down the left-hand side of the space: To the right, a gallery displaying jewelry sits in the front, while a nook with several little tables lies behind it, separated from it by the staircase to the upper floor’s loft-gallery. Several chests of drawers resembling old library card catalogues hold the stock of dry teas for sale, and teapots, books, pottery and other artifacts adorn shelves and sills.

We opted to sit at a table, although the bar is comfortable and affords an excellent view of the teas being prepared. It was a warm day, so I ordered a green tea ginger iced tea ($3), but my guest and I decided to split a small pot ($3) of Jennifer’s Garden as well. The green tea ginger was a fiercely refreshing concoction featuring a formidable zing of fresh ginger that made sweetening it entirely beside the point: It was an experience beyond refreshment and into some other dimension. The Jennifer’s Garden hot tea, a blend with chamomile, lavender, mint and citrus, was soothing without being cloying.

We started off with a plate of the steamed vegetable dumplings ($4), which were your typical potstickers, served on an adorable wooden slab with a rectangular bath of sweetened soy sauce to dip them in. They were chivey, squishy and satisfying in precisely the way that a potsticker is meant to be. They were one of the handful of choices on the “bites” menu of small hot things for nibbling.

I ordered a soup off the day’s special menu—a chilled curried zucchini soup ($4) that was thick, cold, vegetabley and blended to a satisfying smoothness. It was not at all spicy, unlike some of the other items that surprised me with their intensity. Meanwhile, the pleasant, soft-spoken waitress had put a plate of flatbreads on the table for us to dip in a creamy wasabi dip while we waited for the rest of our food. The flatbreads were thin and crispy and encrusted with a sort of Asian-fusion version of the “everything” usually applied to bagels—poppy seeds, rock salt, sesame seeds, crushed red pepper and dried tea leaves. They were strangely addictive, and my guest devoured most of the plate while waiting for his entrée to arrive.

He had the presence of mind to order the ochazuke ($7), which is one of the house’s signature dishes. It’s a reinterpretation of a traditional Japanese “leftovers” kind of dish: The waitress came out with a gigantic bowl of finely chopped vegetables and other fascinating things—pickled plums, shaved carrots, diced green onions, cucumber, red pepper, tea leaves, seaweed—entirely covering a bed of cooked brown rice, and then proceeded to pour a pot of freshly brewed green tea over the whole thing until all was just barely submerged. The result was a delicious and tremendously satisfying creation: The steaming-hot tea slightly cooked the raw vegetables and dissolved the seasonings. In true Japanese style, the ingredients were not so much combined as put next to one another, which meant that no two bites tasted exactly alike.

It was a struggle to find room for dessert after I helped him finish his ochazuke, but we thought that it would be unseemly to ignore half the menu. Tru-teas! has a wide assortment of fresh-baked items, and the cook, Carlo Minchillo, was once upon a time an Artvoice editorial intern renowned for his baked goods. We opted for what proved to be another of their particular specials: the mooncake ($4).

True to its name, the mooncake was a heavenly confection, spongy and round and warm, bathed in heavy cream, glazed with a thin layer of honied ginger and lime, and topped with sliced strawberries and fresh blueberries. It was fortunate that we only ordered one: We inhaled the dessert and would have eaten more, although we were already full to rolling.

Proprietor Trudy Stern was inspired to open Tru-teas! by a pair of tea houses in Washington, DC. As a practicing Buddhist, she’s been interested in Asian culture; as a community activist she has always been involved in social causes, and Stern rhapsodizes happily about all the amazing people she has met through the store and collective.

But she quickly discovered that you cannot have a tea shop without people wanting to have a Victorian-style high tea in it. Tea is such a universal drink, and is connected to rituals across many of the world’s cultures. And so Tru-teas! offers a Higher Tea, which is their take on the Victorian tea: fresh linens, polished silver, scones, fresh flowers, “the works,” for $25 a person with a 24-hour reservation. Stern is also starting a private supper club, by reservation only (email trudy@tru-teas.com), on Thursdays and Fridays, wherein they will serve full dinners, soup to nuts. Currently she is happy to do catering and parties. And, of course, if you just want to stop by for a nice cup of tea and maybe a heavenly dessert or a bite of something healthy, they are open Monday-Saturday 11am-6pm, and serve Sunday brunch noon-5pm. They even have wireless Internet, and on a slow day I could imagine nothing more pleasant than to sit at the bar catching up on my email and watching the tea-brewers at work.