The rise and rise of the Hong Kong tea sommelier
There's as much excitement now about speciality tea as about coffee, and restaurants now employ experts whose sole job it is to oversee the preparation and serving of the beverage
A sommelier is usually a person who helps choose a fancy wine to go with your dinner, but Hong Kong now has sommeliers for quite a different drink: tea.
Kelvin Ng Chi-chuen's full-time job is to guide customers at the InterContinental Hong Kong's Chinese restaurant on which teas to drink with their food. He's also such a connoisseur that even when he goes to Chinese restaurants with his wife and children, he takes his own tea leaves with him.
"Of course, they might not be willing, but I'll say, 'This is the kind of tea that my family and I are used to, so just give me a pot of hot water'. If it's a walk-in, then of course I won't do it, but if it's near where I live and the restaurants that I'm used to, then they know what I like."
Like many Chinese tea lovers, Ng has his own set of teapots, tea cups, and a tea tray that includes a draining rack and trough at the bottom. When he washes the pot and cups with hot water before he brews the tea, the trough catches the excess water. He even has miniature versions of this gear that he takes along whenever he travels.
The thirty-something Ng has been the tea sommelier at Yan Toh Heen at the InterContinental since April 2014. Now he scouts tea shops in Hong Kong for new supplies, writes the descriptions in the restaurant's tea menu, and talks to customers about what to drink with their meal.
He's got this position at a time when more and more people are getting interested in tea, including in the US. There's so much interest in tea that even at Coffee Fest, a trade show for speciality coffee, "there was equal excitement about tea as there was for coffee", according to the market research firm Euromonitor International. From 1990 to 2014, the market for tea in the US has gone from just less than US$2 billion to more than US$10 billion, according to the Tea Association of the USA.