Farmer's Shitty Market

If a city lacks the ethos of community, then there's no point in creating spaces that attempt to foster community- as far as I'm concerned, they're nothing more than marketable attempts at nostalgia for the sake of profit. What happens when you put people without a proper ethos for community in a space that is supposed to foster that ethos an attempt to re-root it? A bunch of rude behaviour; individuals who do not know each other and therefore cannot recognize each other and therefore have no sense of caring to show respect for each other in a civil space, but instead ignore each other, walk ignorantly in front of people, cut them off, and have no qualms about what they just did. These "community spaces" become places of obligation, and bad manners, where people can act poorly towards each other- because they don’t know what community traditionally implies, or historically was, instead today associating it with commodities (cities can be commodities) that say ‘nostalgia’- and therefore think there is no harm of getting in trouble or being shamed by the community because people simply just don't really know each other. Hence, there is no real ethos of community. Cities only kid themselves when they market this idea, unawares it seems of the sense of community diminished by none other than an urbanized life. So as far as I'm concerned, places like farmer's markets in cities are nothing more than carnivelesque spaces where low behaviours flourish and are accepted, especially today when our more or less anti-social public personas just don't talk to each other and expect customer service from merchants who half the time can't speak a lick of English and respond with rude remarks.

Cities only market these spaces so they can make some kind of buck. Shit man, the sinister planner would sell you the rope you were gonna hang him with just to make a buck. These "plans" for community are nothing more than a bunch of flashy rhetoric for profiteering. If planners really gave two shits, they'd stop spewing out crap about grass-roots and at least preach that it takes proper education from the media, and family to foster a sense of relationship and general comradeship in the outside, anti-social, put-on-air space of the public, and that, more importantly, it's going to take a lot of time (generations maybe). But if you don't bring attention to this subject you merely have the shitty continuation of bad behaviours, tourist traps and ridiculous spectacles. But hey, at least the city is making money right? Phh. Some days, I have no truck about dropping out of urban planning.

With that, I've been going to the St. Jacob's Farmer's Market for 10 years with my grandmother to buy tomatoes, only to notice the disrespect towards the old, and disrespect of merchants, and disrespect of space- littered horse shit and god knows what- and I still can't come to terms with that place as having any sense of value or convenience. Nothing it seems is genuine there; vegetables have stickers on them which makes me question their authenticity (or if they were stolen from the back of a produce truck). It'd do that place some good to have a strip-mall or hotel built over it, then maybe it'd at least be a little more civil, and I wouldn't have to put up with one of the rudest spaces in Kitchener-Waterloo.

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Bummer

My thesis needs to be rewritten, which means this next month is a wash, which means I can't go on any ballin' food adventures, not only because I have loads of academic work, but I can't work as planned, take said money and contribute to the food economy. Bummer. So, for the few of you ghosts that frequent my blog: I'm sorry. And if I take doubly long, I'm doubly sorry.

♥Weezee

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Tea in the Suburbs

I can appreciate a poorly planned suburb, but only when someone in all that sprawl decides to run a tea shop out of their house. Tea shops in these here parts are not a rare breed. I could count a handful, which, considering the territory is pretty decent. There are the small dives that serve multiple teas as options to their menus, accompanied by fancy teapots to distract you from the ill-prepared brew, the Asian-pop tea shops, better known as bubble tea shops, which cater to the stereotyped infantilized young adults who like to order ridiculously priced oblong cuts of white bread slathered in chocolate spread, prepackaged spring rolls and powdered noodled soups, who all-the-while love having their ears bleed while listening to unnecessarily loud Asian music- from J-pop to mandorap (Chinese rap music)- nursing their taro milk teas with tapioca pearls. And of course, specialty coffee shops which pride themselves on choices of loose leaf teas and chai tea or matcha lattes. Tea is pretty accessible in the global market, and due to its gentrification (something I've bitched about many-a-time on this blog) in the West is a popular sign of a kind of savvy, zen, above everybody else sophistication. Having a tea instead of a coffee today says not only good health, but expresses control, calm and an identity unassociated from that of the work obsessed Westerner. Well that's bunk! It’s nothing more than playing with signs and having people agreeing to buy into them! In the consumer world- in Waterloo at least- tea has no real depth! It's fallen victim to not only poor preparation, but semiotic banter. You may buy loose leaf, but when it boils down to it you get poorly watered, over saturated, bittered tea that tastes like, well tea. That is, a hot liquid prepared in boiled water that more or less tastes the same in any flavour, thanks to the chalky nature of the steeped bag, with beautiful cardboard flavoured undertones. I buy tea on the go too; but when I do, I often ask myself after the first sip why I agreed to the mess in the first place, especially when the torpid teen behind the counter doesn't know how to properly prepare a tea, or the odd adult patron, who may potentially know tea, assumes the customer doesn't and compromises any flavours for convenience and profit. I guess I always assume I can either learn how to better prepare the drink, because those who serve me, I assume, are professionals; or that someone somewhere will finally give me a good brew. It's gotten bad, dear readers. So bad that when I do go out, I depend on either espressos, or asking for a pot of boiled water and my tea on the side, removing the lid and patiently watching the steam until it drifts side to side in order to gauge some semblance of proper temperature. But even that's a difficult task, especially in a public space where people are coming and going, messing with my air flow. I told you. I take tea seriously. It was all up to me in my home before today.

Thankfully, lately I've developed somewhat of a cabin fever when it comes to preparing tea; bored with the flavours I have, and the routines of preparation I commonly go through to prepare a decent cup, I was hoping for something new in the way of tea. And I found it in the most unexpected and apprehensive of places. In a duplex, in a new suburb, beside other kinds of businesses in duplexes in that same suburb supported by nothing more than a flimsy banner over the entrance saying "Tina's Tea" followed by a phone number. Not even a website (Do you see what consumer culture has done to me? Not even the little guy, who in this case has excellent tea kung fu, has a chance at business because I equate simple advertisements or signage as sign of poor quality). Yeah, yeah, I know. Never judge a book by its cover. Well, luckily, a while ago, while perusing forests for morels, I came across this humbling, now coveted tea cul-de-sac.

Tina's Tea, formally known on the shop's business card as Tina Tea Room, is an attempt at giving patrons a proper cup of tea, for a reasonable cost, in my own tea drinking opinion. Because anyone can dunk a bag in boiling water or drench leaves with the same; but it takes a special someone to do it properly- to know the kind of tea, the proper temperature that accompanies its preparation and the proper time it needs to steep. Let's face it, people are lazy. I'm lazy, you're lazy, we're all lazy in our own right, and unless you like doing something as mundane as preparing tea, you're not gonna do it right. But you're gonna let someone do it for you, provided the price is right, and the tea holds its own kind of flavour. Not chalky cardboard bag flavour. That and the fact that unless you were raised by Asians in the desert, or are have some kind of tea aficionado grandfather, or like to read extensively in order to quench your own voluptuous obsessive compulsive perfectionist tea yearnings, you probably don't know how to make a proper cup of tea. Again, probably because you don't care. That's why Tina Tea Room works well for both kinds of consumers: for the kind that appreciates the art of a good cup of tea, and for the other kind that likes tasty things and impressing those they dine with with tasty things (Y'know? Dudes that take out dudettes and try to impress them with "sophisticating" things. That scenario could certainly play out in this case).


With its bashful beige walls and three meager wicker tables, Tina Tea Room is a more than intimate space. It's a testament to the devoted few that still wish for the experience of a proper tea and a residue of what's left of the tea shops that catered to the hundreds that frequented them at a time during China's folkloric past. Yup, I was a regular 孔乙己,making whatever due I could through poor academic work, wearing poor clothes (a symptom of expensive academics), and regaling my drinking compadre with maxims of Confucius. Only instead of booze, I was drinking tea, and instead of peas, I was eating a bowl of dried cranberries and apricots, admiring the mess of old lady Victorian trinkets, porcelain waterfalls, multiple origami cranes, plastic plants and Chinese charms that were placed tenderly around the dining room. A humble attempt at decoration, which not only made the experience seem more intimate, but a sincere expression that our proprietor, Tina herself, was doing her best to make hers a legitimate, serious business. And like I've said many-a-time: I've come to expect the most authentic food establishments to neglect appearance and 'proper design' in favour of putting food first. Of course, that just may be my own cognitive dissonance. But in my experience, interior has never been the thing of any small mom and pop's Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese restaurant in my opinion. Weezee legend holds it's only a cover for mediocre eats- or tea in this case. There's no need to play the association game in a humbling tea shop. If you want to associate a physical space with your taste and cultural capital, save it for some fancy five star restaurant, comrades. You won't get it here. What you will get however, is dedicated service, a woman who doesn't let your cup run empty (which is a feat for the cup sized tea pot you're given), and the experience of feeling like you're being spoiled by an older, babying aunt serving tea- your assuming, attractive, Chinese aunt serving tea. I certainly wasn't complaining, not in this intimate space; not with the 3 Japanese girls giggling sweet nothings about Justin Bieber in Japanese beside me; not with the constant bowls of dried fruit (something Tina gave my party and I on the house- a cheap 2 dollars on the menu).

It wasn't all this simple however; we essentially started our visit tip-toe-ing in, slowly opening the door, asking if it was alright to enter, and taking our shoes off before climbing the stairs to our seats. Tina was more than happy to accompany us; after given a menu, and unwittingly given a pot of Tie Guan Yin (an oolong) tea, we were well on our way to figuring out what kind of teas the place served. This was partly my fault however; I was somewhat dismissive when asked what tea we'd like to drink, assuming the host was fluent in English and would riddle the menu off from memory. Ah, the joys of food and language barriers. I've lost a small fortune through these kinds of misunderstandings; but, they were delicious misunderstandings nonetheless.


Tina Tea Room's tea selection is very limited; however, that may either be a symptom of its newness, or Tina's seriousness in regards to tea, brewing tea, and drinking tea. What is offered for drink is rather high in quality and consisting of the purest kinds of teas. I say pure in respect to teas that aren't made up of filler like fruit and useless herby flavours, but strictly leaves and different levels of fermenting processes. That's why a 1.5 litre pot can run a patron from 10.00 to 20.00 dollars, which equates to 5 small pots of tea in one sitting. That said, it's sufficient between a small group of two or three, or someone who's ready to get their drink on. One can even purchase a single cup of Long Jing (Dragon Well) tea for 2.00 dollars. But only Long Jing. Nothing else. I would have liked to see more options in that regard, but I'm sure there's a particular etiquette and reasoning I'm unaware of. Our own tea had a trace of the bitterness any drinker would hate to find in their brew. Still, being unfamiliar with oolongs, I was unsure if that was a characteristic of the tea itself, or a miscalculation on the brewer's part. If there was one good quality of the tea being served to us it was that it never lost its strength, and that was probably a result of being given fresh brewed tea constantly, which worried my company and me at one point because we were confident we were racking up a large bill. However, our being first time customers, we were pleasantly surprised by our cheap bill of 10.00 dollars, even after all the tea we drank and the excessive amounts of dried fruit we were given to snack on, not to mention the some odd 10 sweet red bean spring rolls we were given to try- another compliment of the place's wonderful host. Tina was the most accommodating gastronome I had ever met, and it did this heart good. She even refused our generous tip by the time we ended our stint. She even left the tea room several times, leaving us alone like two good big boys, while she cooked in her kitchen basement and we listened gingerly to the sounds of her sizzling wok through the floorboards (okay, not floorboards- good, wood paneled flooring. I'm a sucker for metaphor though and literary romance, you all know that). Being left alone as two strangers in an empty tea room in the late afternoon didn't feel strange at all, but rather, like home.


And if you're feeling a bit peckish, no worries. Tina Tea Room plays well to the tea time dynamic by offering snacks for hungry customers. Be forewarned however, these things are not meant as substitutes for meals, though I'm sure you could buy enough to fill you up. But I am a puritan, and believe in a bourgeoisie ethos, and thereby believe (in my own opinion) that one as a frequenter of tea shops should come to converse and appreciate the art of fine tea and merely nibble on the foods offered. The menu is pretty scattershot, but very cheap for the amount of food you're given, and I say take advantage of this before business picks up and portions become smaller. I always assume the worst under the shadow of late capitalism, especially in the food industry where things on average reach a markup of 60%. But that's boring! Let me tell you about the oddities that run the menu of Tina Tea Room; there are the things that one expects in theme with a tea room run by a Chinese woman like dried fruit, fried dumplings, and sweet spring rolls, and the things that makes one turn their head and have a what the *f moment like French fries, chips and cheetos, and chicken nuggets. But, those three options are as weird as the menu gets. These, as the Chinese say, xiao chi 小吃 (lit. small eats, col. snacks) run from a mere .50 cents to 3.50; and ironically the only thing that is 3.50 is the chicken nuggets. All very affordable, all dwarfed under the menu by the tea, which as far as I'm concerned is how it should be. Otherwise, those strange menu options are attempts to gauge an audience and are very liable to change, I just hope more people visit so I have a place to go and drink. You know my history of eating at places that don't last longer than two months, six at most. And Tina Tea Room is definitely a place I wouldn't mind visiting at least once a week. The tea may be limited (for now) but the company certainly isn't.

Bill: One pot of tea (1.5l): 10.00 dollars

Tina Tea Room
F33-619 Wild Ginger Ave.
Waterloo, On
N2V 2X1
Tel: (519) 279-4465
Cell: (519) 573-8368
Email (that's right, email): hym199732@hotmail.com

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