When the global pandemic shut down Lisa McDonald’s TeaHaus along with so many other small cafés and shops, brave decisions were required. While the Kerrytown-area shop’s core business was and remains selling a line of some 250 loose teas, the loss of the popular full English tea service and their local lunch crowd forced a handful of layoffs.
It also led to supporting the food-insecure, a space-shifting remodeling within its historic building, a liquor license to serve tea-infused drinks, and even a surprise book deal from a top publisher.
McDonald planned to reopen for in-person shopping just before Thanksgiving. “The bar part can follow,” she says, as soon as her partially recouped staff is ready.
Lisa McDonald’s space-shifting remodeling within TeaHaus’s historic building included a liquor license to serve tea-infused drinks, and even a surprise book deal from a top publisher. | Photo: J. Adrian Wylie
The concept is shifting to “less restaurant lunch and more proper café,” she says, so they’ll start staying open into the evenings. While McDonald isn’t a big drinker herself, she’s been lending her tea expertise to bars, restaurants, distilleries, and breweries around the region in concocting tea-infused cocktails, beers, and liqueurs. “Being able to bring that in as an aspect will be really nice,” she says.
The tea store still occupies the storefront where it opened in 2007 but McDonald has traded the neighboring storefront to the north (now Mindo Chocolate Makers Shop) for the corner space to the south (most recently Ann Arbor Running Co.). The new space has about as many seats as the old one, but it’s “just a more open feel that flows better,” she finds.
The trade-off was leaving behind her kitchen, so that’s now in the back of another leased building facing E. Ann. Although they haven’t served tea and their all-scratch food on site since March 2020, pickup orders have continued, and the kitchen went pro bono to provide sack lunches to low-income housing residents and hot meals to the Food Gatherers kitchen at the Delonis Center. “We still do that every week,” McDonald says, “and I don’t think that will stop, ever.”
The front of the Ann St. building is now taking shape as the TeaHaus event space, and that’s where the full English tea service—finger sandwiches, scones, and dessert—will resume on a regularly scheduled basis. “We wanted to make it special again,” McDonald says, “You might not be able to come on your birthday, but you can definitely come on your birthday month.”
A Colorado native, McDonald met her Michigan-born, Ukrainian American husband Marc Hewko in Europe, where she taught, consulted, and eventually gained formal certification as a tea sommelier—one of just seven in the U.S. They’ve raised their sons, Tim and Andrew, both at Skyline High, as true townies: McDonald proudly notes Tim’s choice to have his senior pictures taken at TeaHaus.
Amid all the turmoil and strategic changes in the works, McDonald and her “amazing researcher” coauthor Jill Rheinheimer have just finished writing Tea for Dummies, joining a long list of instructional/informational titles under the familiar Wiley brand.
It was not a project she sought; in fact, the publisher had been after her for months. “I put it in my spam folder because I thought they were phishing!” she says. Tea for Dummies is now available to preorder, including on the TeaHaus website, and she expects to stock it when it’s released in March.
For all the upheaval of the pandemic, McDonald found bright spots in delivering meals to people in need and bringing renewed focus to her core competency, the teas themselves. She sees the reopening as the next step toward her twin aims of cultivating appreciation for fine teas and building community.
Customers can check their tech in an antique file cabinet, and there’s no guest Wi-Fi. McDonald expects that, and the other changes, will occasion more of the “friendliest, most wonderful hate mail on the face of the Earth.
“We’ll have puzzles; we’ll have games, books, newspapers,” she explains. “I don’t care if you sit here for six hours with a $3 cup of tea talking to a friend. I just don’t want people here for six hours with their earphones on and completely turned off in the world. I think we’ve done that way too much for the last two years.
“And I think it’s time that we look up.”
TeaHaus, 204 N. Fourth Ave., (734) 622–0460. Tues.–Sat. 10 a.m.–10 p.m., Sun. 10 a.m.–mid-afternoon time TBD. Closed Mon. teahaus.com
