Master tea-blender Rod Markus will pour hot water over just about anything edible. I learned this within moments of sitting down at Rare Tea Cellar, his Ravenswood laboratory stocked with unusual and hard-to-find ingredients.
Markus steeped a Mallorca Melon tea blend of Spanish melon, pineapple, hibiscus and Seville orange with a few paper-thin slices of nutty cured jamón ibérico de Bellota, or acorn-fed ham from free-roaming Spanish pigs. The ham lent a salty, almost floral earthy note to the juicy and lush fruit flavors.
“The idea is really like the fruit tea is almost like a sangria sauce at that point, so how could it not go well with jamón de Bellota?” Markus said quite matter-of-factly, donning his customary all-black suit. “We aren’t scared to try just about anything, though. You never know what’s going to fit together.”
For the first time, Markus’ Rare Tea Cellars is moving more aggressively into retail at specialty grocer Piccadilly Market, which just opened in Lincoln Square. The partners behind The Green Post and The Northman teamed up with three artisanal Chicago brands — Rare Tea, Backlot Coffee and Pretty Cool Ice Cream — on the market and cafe, which stocks small-batch, sometimes exclusive products.
Meanwhile, Rare Tea’s trove of freeze-dried earthly delights, infused oils, spices, vinegars, caviar, chili pastes and aged soy sauces continue to supercharge the imaginations of chefs and bartenders at more than 1,800 high-end restaurants, bars and hotels across the U.S. and beyond.
But Markus’ first love will always be tea, which is why I’ve sought him out to help me up my own sad tea game.
With degrees in psychology and hypnotherapy — “Education I still use everyday to this day,” he said — Markus started Rare Tea some 27 years ago, following a career importing wine and cigars. It was the nascent days of the internet, so he sent money orders by post to China and a month or two later received parcels of tea.
But the more he tasted, the more he learned that tea is as terroir-driven and complex as wine. Black and green teas grown on specific mountains in China and Sri Lanka deliver deeply nuanced and rich flavor bouquets. Certain parcels of Darjeeling exhibit sweet, muscatel grape–like notes, while shade-grown Japanese teas deliver unmatched umami. He discovered the almost haunting pine and honey qualities of hand-picked Emperor’s Ceylon Platinum white tea from the highest mountaintops of Sri Lanka’s Dimbula region.
Three or four years into the business, high-end places like Alinea, Park Hyatt Chicago and since-shuttered Blackbird caught wind of the extraordinary ingredients Markus was blending into tea.
“People started asking for single ingredients in my blends,” Markus said. “And just like that, we took our portfolio of ingredients from 800 teas to 2,000 raw ingredients overnight. From that point forward, every ingredient we got in, I’d pour hot water over it and see how it infused.”
A few notes on pairing tea with food from Rod Marcus
Black tea: Because it’s generally more robust, pair black tea with heartier foods, such as a stew, steak or roasted vegetable dish. “The key to tea is you want it to be able to pop on top of the food,” Markus said. “If it’s too muted, too umami-driven or too vegetal, like a green tea, it won’t be an ultimate pairing for people.”
Green tea: Something like seafood is a natural pairing for green tea, especially if it’s from Japan. “There are natural, amazing vegetal, seaweed notes that go perfectly with seafood, vegetables or salads,” Markus said.
White tea: These will be least powerful, so they should be paired with something extremely light, like a crudo or very light cold vegetable dish.
For vanguard chef Rafa Esparza, who regularly raids Rare Tea’s coffers for menu inspiration, the place is an incubator for creativity in its purest form.
“Rare Tea is a muse, right? But it’s so much more than that,” said Esparza, who partners with chefs Anthony Baier and Katharine Urso on the late-night popup FAFO, which ended its year-long residency at Moneygun in March. (Follow the roving chefs’ next moves on Instagram.)
“Rod and [national sales manager] Brian [Shrago] up the ante by really letting you explore the flavors yourself. I’ve sat there for five, sometimes six hours. It’s so important as a creative person to have a place where you can bring a real, fresh, raw idea and come away with something polished.”
Sitting in Markus’ emporium of rarities, I felt almost disrespectful confessing a penchant for milky PG Tips (the Lipton-owned U.K. tea brand), which Markus told me is the equivalent of loose-leaf tea dust. But the pursuit of better tea demands humility, and anyway, Markus isn’t one to judge.
It’s a no-brainer to upgrade to the loose-leaf Regal English Breakfast blend he created 24 years ago, a black tea glow-up that would cost up to around $60 per pound — a rather shocking increase compared to my standard 40-bag box for $6.99. But Markus countered that even his rarest teas only cost about $1 per serving.
“From that serving, you can make two to three infusions,” he said. “When you stretch it like that, you realize it’s approachable at any level, even high-end varietals.”
Markus is steadfast in his conviction that people overthink tea, assuming the process requires all sorts of gadgetry and temperature gauges, not unlike making pour-over coffee. The easiest path to what he calls “the loose-leaf religion” is investing in disposable tea bags. Rare Tea likes the T-Sac brand.
“You take a scoop of tea you’d normally put into a teapot and put it into the bag. Then you can infuse it into any cup of hot water on the fly or even take it when you travel,” he said.
Markus poured me Rare Tea’s trendiest tea on offer: the almost inky Electric Blue Sweet Seoul Matcha, whose hue comes from adding blue pea flowers to stone-ground Japanese Shizuoka Tencha matcha and cane sugar.
Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan can’t get enough of this stuff, which flies off the shelf at his Highland Park teahouse Madame Zuzu’s.
“Billy’s obsessed with blue,” Markus said.
This novelty matcha inspired an oddball application on FAFO’s debut menu last winter, said Esparza: blue-tinted hard-boiled eggs, whose yolks he piped with uni, salted black sesame seeds and spirulina hot sauce, then topped each with another Rare Tea find — tart, crunchy black ants.
“For me, it’s gotta be tasty; weird is just a bonus,” Esparza quipped.
Blue obsession notwithstanding, demand for matcha has exploded, so much that the value of the global market is predicted to jump from $2.3 billion this year to $2.89 billion in 2028. This owes to its health benefits, versatility and overwhelming popularity among younger generations — no doubt due to the rolling virality of matcha concoctions on TikTok, which are contributing to a matcha shortage in Japan.
How to brew tea
- Boil. The No. 1 most important ingredient in tea is clean water, Markus said. Thus, bring either purified or spring water (“which is next-level”) to a boil.
- Measure. Brewing usually requires 1 tablespoon of tea leaves per 12 ounces of water, though this ratio may vary depending on the tea. For cold-brewed tea, which is one of Markus’ favorite expressions, use 1.5 times the amount of tea leaves you would for hot tea — so, for every 12 to 14 ounces of water, use 1.5 tablespoons of tea leaves.
- Steep. Start with 3 minutes and taste, up to around 5 minutes. “The brew time for herbal tea is longer than actual tea leaves, because tea leaves get tannins when brewed too long, whereas herbals can handle a longer infusion,” Markus says. Steep cold-brew tea for 48 to 72 hours, again tasting as you go.
How to store tea: Tea’s No. 1 enemy is air. Store it in a glass jar or a tin that seals out oxidation and loss of flavor. It should last six months to a year if it’s in a good container.
The difference between matcha and other teas is that there’s no filtration, Markus said, meaning you’re ingesting actual tea leaves and their intrinsic benefits, like fiber and chlorophyll. He doesn’t care if you sip it hot or iced, plain, with sugar, in a latte or milkshake, or bake it into cookies. Make sure it’s sourced from Japan. (Currently, there’s no regulation of or recognized industry standard for matcha.)
Just before I left, he poured me one more mind-bending infusion: wild Thai banana “tea,” made by steeping this Thai fruit that’s picked when it’s almost overripe, then dried, meaning it’s naturally teeming with fructose.
You can now sip wild Thai banana in a spirit-free cocktail with fresh coconut water at the Bamboo Room or a boozy one at Dorian’s Through the Record Shop, where it infuses Bayab pan-African gin, stirred into a banana coconut Negroni. You can bite into it in cookie form at Summer House Santa Monica (their No. 1 cookie, by the way) or taste it swirled into ice cream with Parmesan, then served alongside baba au soju on Perilla Steak’s dessert menu. Rare Tea Cellar’s banana suppliers, on the other hand, still can’t believe most of this product is going into beverage infusions.
“They’re still convinced I make granola with it,” Markus said.
