Big dreams are brewing–along with nearly 100 varieties of tea–at My Place for Tea, the tiny shop Enrico and Minerva Zamora opened on Belmont in January. There’s full-bodied mango black from Ceylon, an Indian Darjeeling dressed up with rose petals, and a pale, tropical pineapple-scented green variety. South American yerba mate is for sale, as are its traditional drinking gourd and metal straw. There is Japanese hojicha, made from twigs, Korean barley tea, which tastes like coffee, and marzipan tea laced with rum. “Someday we want to open tea stations in hospitals, offices, convenience stores, banks, everywhere,” says Enrico.
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The Zamoras, both Filipino by birth, met in Chicago on a blind date 14 years ago. When Minerva told Enrico she had some high school academic medals she wanted to frame, she learned that Enrico’s family had made them. In fact, his great-grandfather Crispulo Zamora was the country’s first engraver. The Zamora family supplied medals, plaques, trophies, and belt buckles to schools and institutions including the U.S. military. At one point the Marcos government was its biggest customer. “I made millions and millions of campaign buttons for Marcos’s last election,” says Enrico, who took over the business after his father died.
The Zamoras started trying to think of a business they could run. A laundry was one possibility, but in his research Enrico stumbled across a couple of tea companies–one was an importer, the other a supplier to hotels–and was intrigued. “We saw an opportunity,” he says: tea retailing seemed like a market that was untapped in the midwest. Already an avid tea drinker, he decided he would produce a line of private-label teas. Last summer the couple started selling it over their Web site, www.myplace4tea.net. They also attended a conference in Denver entitled “Tea for Pleasure and Profit” and joined the American Tea Society. Then, since tea is a “touch-and-feel” kind of business, says Enrico–“People want to see it and smell it”–they started looking around for storefronts.
Enrico and Minerva hope to open more little shops around Chicago, and they’d like to be able to educate people about tea without turning the world’s second most popular drink–after water–into a status symbol. The formality of English tea is not for them, nor is the ritualization of Asian tea ceremonies, says Enrico. “We want to keep tea casual.”
