Why Gongfu Tea? - How It Shaped My Life

Chapter One | The House of Coffee

I was born in Bronx, NY in a Puerto Rican household where coffee wasn't just a drink — it was a religion. Both my parents each drank about three cups before they even thought of starting their day. Three cups…minimum! Each! Before breakfast! Before any conversation! Before any acknowledgement that the rest of the world existed! The aroma wasn’t just present; it took over the house, settling into curtains, clothes, and my memory.

And, I grew to dislike it. Not because I'd tasted it and didn't like it, but because it was overwhelming and inescapable, in an aggressive way.

My grandmother, who lived with us, offered an alternative. She’d occasionally make me milk tea; Lipton tea bag, heavy on the milk, heavier on the sugar. Looking back, it was closer to a dessert than a beverage. But it was warm, comforting, and most importantly, it was mine.

I didn’t know it then, but that was my first real introduction to tea, and the first step on a road I'm still walking.

Chapter Two | The Manhood Myth

After high school, I landed my first real professional job as a draftsman. On the first day, I showed up for work with a newspaper in one hand and a cup of deli coffee in another. For me, it was my way of foraying into the ‘manhood experience’. It felt right. It felt cinematic. It felt like I was finally doing 'the thing'.

A few sips in, my body staged an immediate and emphatic protest. I will spare you the details, but I will say this: I made it to the bathroom just in time.

Coffee was no longer a choice for me in the break room. What I gravitated to instead — and this came naturally, without any grand decision — was tea.

In my early twenties, when out with friends, last call at the bar, and then somehow everyone ends up at the local diner, in a booth at 2 am over eggs and bad jokes. My friends would order coffee. I ordered tea. Every time. It wasn’t a conscious choice at the time; it was just what felt right. While they chased caffeine or sugar, I found comfort in something quieter. It was mine, and I was perfectly happy.

Chapter Three | From The Kitchen To The Tea Leaf

The real shift happened in the late 90s, when I was sous chef for a prominent chef who handed me what felt, at the time, like an unusual assignment: develop tea-infused dishes for a magazine feature he was working on. I didn't fully grasp what I'd been handed.

Until then, tea had just been a drink — it was something pleasant, familiar, but also limited. That project cracked it open completely. Tea wasn’t just something you sipped. It could be layered, textured and expressive at the same time. The first outcome of this creative culinary exercise was a citrus Darjeeling poached red snapper. The dish that made everything click. The floral brightness of the Darjeeling tea lifted the fish in a way no stock or broth could have. It was delicate, aromatic, and unlike anything I had made before.

I was hooked, for I knew something had opened up. I spent the rest of my culinary career chasing that feeling. Tea became a genuine ingredient in my cooking. Not a gimmick, not a party trick, but a real tool with real depth. When I eventually opened my own restaurant, it had a presence on the menu that I was proud of. A few dishes that still make me smile to think about: Lapsang Souchong Braised Beef Short Ribs, Gyokuro Gravlox, Hojicha Ochazuke, and a red or white cold brew served in a wine glass.

Chapter Four | Sobriety, Buddhism, & Finding My Table

In 2007, as adulthood crept in on me, I made the difficult choice to live in sobriety. It was a necessary step in a life that had become quite chaotic. I started moving slowly and deliberately, toward something quieter. I made a connection to Buddhism, which began shaping how I saw the world. Letting go of alcohol felt like the next step forward.

But sobriety comes with a quiet cost. When you stop drinking, you discover very quickly which friendships were held together by alcohol. Some people I'd known for years — good people, people I genuinely liked — just sort of drifted away. Not with any drama or falling-out. We just stopped overlapping. The bar was the meeting place. Without the bar, there was no map. Without alcohol as the glue, we realised there wasn’t much else holding us together. That realisation was difficult, but it was also honest.

What filled that space was tea, specifically, Gongfu tea. It gave me — and I did not see this coming — a social life that actually fit who I was becoming. The Gongfu ceremony is, in itself, a form of meditation. The attention it demands and the depth it insists on does something to the people sitting around the table. Defences come down. The performance stops. You're just there, with the tea, with each other.

Around the Gongfu tea table, people feel comfortable and tranquil. They realise no one there is judging them, and they tend to open up, which creates true friendships and long-lasting bonds. I found that I could meet new people, build real relationships, have genuine conversations, all without a drop of alcohol in the room.

Chapter Five | Finding Gongfu Tea & The Stillness In The Pour

My deeper journey into tea began in 2011. My uncle-in-law, an elder from Hong Kong and a devoted tea enthusiast, introduced me to a 35-year-old Pu'er tea cake. I didn't know what I was about to taste. I didn't know that this cup would rearrange things and light a genuine spark of curiosity in me, and I followed it.

That spark turned into annual trips to parts of China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, visiting the farms, meeting the farmers, watching how tea is processed from leaf to cup. Those early visits confirmed everything I'd felt around that first cup of aged Pu'er. But more than deepening my love for tea itself, they introduced me to the practice of Gongfu Cha as a way of life.

There is a phrase I came across somewhere in those early years that I've never been able to shake: "Tea is the most important item at the tea table, and simultaneously, it is the most unimportant item at the tea table." It sounds contradictory, almost like a riddle, until you've sat at the table enough times to understand it. The tea brings people together, of course, and that part is real and essential. But once everyone has settled, the tea becomes almost beside the point. What's actually happening is something rarer: people are connecting, genuinely, without pretence, without agenda. The tea is just the door. What matters is what's on the other side of it.

Chapter Six | The Birth Of NYTS

Every time I came home from one of those early trips, I found myself restless. I wanted to find a Gongfu tea setting in New York. A place with a real table, real tea and real conversation. This turned out to be nearly impossible to find.

So I built one at home. I set up a tea space I was genuinely proud of and started inviting my friends over. They came. They were polite. They patronised it. They endured it. But the genuine interest fell short. I could feel the gap between what I was experiencing and what they were getting out of it, and I couldn't blame them.

In 2015, I started a meetup group to see if people with a genuine interest existed, and they did. They were out there in New York City, scattered, looking for exactly the same thing I'd been looking for. And once I put out the signal, they found me.

We started small, brewing Gongfu tea after dinner at local restaurants. Then we moved our sessions to my restaurant, which had a beautiful garden that turned out to be a perfect setting. The group grew. The conversations deepened. In 2019, we incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit as New York Tea Society.

We've moved around the city over the years from the Upper East Side, Chinatown and Koreatown in Manhattan to Flushing and Forest Hills in Queens, just trying to figure things out. We're currently back in Koreatown, in a larger space designed intentionally for tranquillity.

From my grandmother's too-sweet cup of morning tea to a thirty-five-year-old Pu'er cake to a room full of strangers who became friends, the thread is the same one all the way through.

Tea didn't just survive every chapter of my life. It shaped them. And it's still going.

I invite you all to come share a Gongfu tea session with me and experience the magic of the leaf!