“Are you sure?” asks the waitress when she hears my order. She’s staring at me, the middle-aged guy who just requested something he shouldn’t have. I would love to tell her. It’s because of my son, you see. He thinks I need to get out of my comfort zone. Explore the world. Talk to other people. He thinks that since his mother and I divorced I became a hermit, and I can’t take risks. I have to prove to him that I’m cool. At least a little. So, I picked our favorite restaurant, the Tibetan one down the street, and decided to do something I’ve never done before. Something he taunted me to do many times. Something I can talk to him about over the phone or through text and that will make him laugh.
“Yes, Miss … I’m sure.”
She sighs, then shrugs. “It’s your funeral, Dude … I can already tell you’re not gonna like it.”
A moment later, she puts a cup down in front of me and gives me a pointed look. I thank her as politely as I can; she goes back beyond the counter after wishing me good luck with a tone indicating she doesn’t think I will even survive the experience.
In front of me there’s a mug of tea. It’s unassuming at a glance, your regular tea with milk. This reassures me a bit and I believe that maybe this is not the challenge everyone makes it to be. My first sip is still on the cautious side, and I can almost hear my son, mocking me. “Come on, Dad, you drink like Grandma.” And since the flavor doesn’t seem so bad, I gulp a bigger quantity of the warm liquid. Then as the oily, thick beverage fills my mouth, its taste explodes on my tongue.
This is awful. A medley of ingredients that shouldn’t go together. First, there’s the salt, a lot of it. Then the greasiness of the butter. Yak’s butter, not cow’s, my body assures me. Everything in this place is authentic. Its softness muted by the ensuing bitterness of the tea left to brew for too long for my palate. Everybody tells you it’s not something you want to experience elsewhere than high up in the mountains, where it is welcome after the cold outside. I realize with a cough that they’re all right.
Part of me craves to spit the revolting liquid but I’m too old and too polite to do so. It’s with a grimace of disgust that I force myself to swallow the mouthful, trying to keep my reaction to a minimum. The waitress is not fooled. She comes by my table with a grin. “And will that be enough for you, sir?”
I let out a cough, struggling to get rid of the taste as the salt, butter and tea cling stubbornly to my tongue. “Yes,” I say. “Entirely.”
I hope Ryan will enjoy the retelling because I’m not doing that again.
adventures in tea tasting by Alizé Gabaude is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Alizé Gabaude 