By Jamie Saxon

Photography by David Kelly Crow

There is a certain poetry, an unspoken connection to a deep source of quiet, in wrapping your hands around a cup of hot tea, watching the swell of silent steam swirl skyward, and inhaling the scent of steeping tea leaves—with a clean bite of citrus, a secret whisper of fragrant floral, the earthy green breath of herbs, or the arranged marriage of pungent spices.

In New York, a midwinter tea crawl can satisfy every palate and sensibility—from armchair traveler to bar lizard, from minimalist to homesick New Englander. Let’s say the temperature has dipped below freezing, your feet hurt from walking for blocks, and your arms are groaning from the weight of your post-holiday sales stash. What you need is a cuppa—the balm for all pains, physical and emotional, real or imagined—as Mrs. Hughes of Downton Abbey might say.

At Tea and Sympathy (110 Greenwich Avenue in the West Village between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, across from Jane Street), you can have your fi ll of bangers and mash and a nice cuppa, while enjoying all the photos of the royals on the wall and the smashing accents of the staff. Feel free to check whatkatewore.com (my go-to site for all things Kate Middleton) to get in the mood.

Owner Nicky Perry, a high-spirited Londoner with masses of enviable curls, landed stateside in 1981, started working in restaurants, quickly fell in with the British music crowd, and one night found herself at a party talking to Kate Pierson of the B52s. “She said there was no place in New York to get a good cup of tea,” Perry said. “I had the idea in my head for 12 years.”

On a Saturday afternoon just before Christmas, I found Perry knee deep in boxes of Wilken & Sons jam, tins of Christmas pudding, and Nestlé Milkybars next door at the Tea and Sympathy store. Floor to ceiling shelves groaned with all manner of beloved British pantry staples (Bachelors Mushy Peas, McVitie’s digestive biscuits, Bisto beef gravy granules— really!) and all the sweets and comestibles you’d expect in a hamper delivered to some knock-kneed, freckle-faced choir boy or great great- granddaughter of an earl at boarding school.

“Right after Christmas the cupboards are bare, just like old Mother Hubbard,” Perry says. As for her own go-to junk food, it’s Cadbury’s chocolate fingers. Wielding a three-foot-long holiday box of them, she says: “I’ve got these all over my house.”

Her husband, Sean Kavanagh Dowsett, was a Tea and Sympathy customer. The couple now run the café and store together.

Inside the cozy tearoom, tiny tables are squeezed together but nobody seems to mind. Plates are filled with British comfort food—Heinz baked beans on toast, cottage pie, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, sausage rolls, sticky toffee pudding, and scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam. The tea arrives in quirky pots from Perry’s vast collection, served properly of course, the teacups saddled with a metal tea strainer.

Just don’t ask Perry about the day Princess Diana walked past her on the sidewalk in London and smiled at her. The memory brings tears to her eyes.

Like Perry, Dawn Cameron, owner of the zen-like, sleek but unpretentious Sanctuary T (337 West Broadway, corner of Grand Street), hatched her teashop idea because of something she couldn’t find in New York—a simple good glass of iced tea.

“I am from the South where ‘sweet or unsweet?’ was the only question one was asked when one ordered tea,” Cameron says. “It was always assumed to be iced unless you specified hot tea.”

While working long hours in finance, first at Lazard and then at a family investment fund, and living in a tiny, dark studio apartment, Cameron began to daydream about a place like Sanctuary T. “I associate tea with comfort, warmth and familiarity, but I also drink it when I need to think, to stay awake, to focus or to face the day.”

As Cameron drew up her business plan, she visited every teashop in New York as well as several other cities. “I found them to either be overly snobby or overly pedestrian,” Cameron says. “I wanted to create a refuge from the intensity of New York City.”

The menu by executive chef Donovan Tian is innovative, rustic and health conscious with appetizers such as house-made burrata crostino with heirloom cherry tomatoes and entrees such as miso-marinated salmon with lemon pilaf and sweet and spicy Brussels sprouts.

The extensive tea menu includes gems such as flowering teas (I tried the jasmine white lily), which arrive in a large wine glass with a little blob floating in it that is actually tea tied with string around a flower; the hot water opens it up.

Bestsellers include Hugs & Kisses, ginger peach-flavored green tea; Geisha Beauty, peach black tea; Spring Harvest, passion fruit green tea; Serenity, an herbal blend, and Energy.

As I sink my teeth into the wickedly delicious cauliflower steak appetizer (broiled and served with a caper gremolata) and sip cranberry acai tea, I watch as manager East Lee—think style guru Carson Kressley’s personality garnished with the good looks of Hawaii Five-O star Daniel Dae Kim Lee—put together a custom gift box for a woman who said her brother was a tea snob. Undaunted, Lee deftly marches his fingers through a Rolodex of tea choices and tucked tins of teas and tea-infused culinary seasonings into the box.

Sanctuary T’s full bar serves cocktails such as the Earl Grey tea martini and the mean green margarita, which is made with green tea and jalapeno-infused tequila and gets its green color from matcha powder.

In the theater district, Radiance Tea (158 West 55th St. between Sixth and Seventh avenues, across from City Center) is an oasis of calm. I slip past throngs of tween girls—pressed against the roped barriers outside a stage door, waiting for a glimpse of One Direction, in town as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live—and escape up a flight of stairs to the spacious tearoom.

Radiance is part Asian tearoom, part bookshop with a remarkable range of books about China and Japan—travel, memoirs, children’s books, history, music, flowers, and of course, tea.

I strike up a conversation with the couple beside me. Grettel Singer, a writer and self-described tea connoisseur, has taken tea tours all over the world from Paris and Rome to Rio de Janeiro. She has visited just about every tea place in New York and makes sure I know about Podunk in the East Village (more on that later); Ten Re Tea (75 Mott Street), which she claims is the best teashop in Chinatown; Cha-An (239 East Ninth Street), an authentic Japanese tea house; and for families, Alice’s Tea Cup (102 West 73rd Street, 156 E. 64th Street; and 220 East 81st Street), “the bastion of all things pink and baked,” according to the Village Voice, in an Alice in Wonderland setting.

Singer and her companion are enjoying a pot of Big Red Roke tea. The tea menu, which is the length of a small novella and reads like a sommelier talks, describes Big Red Roke as “the King of Tea, a small annual yield makes it one of the most sought after and expensive teas; features a long-lasting sweet taste with roasty (sic) and floral aroma.”

I settle on the Golden Monkey, a Chinese black tea: “This legendary top 10 Chinese tea is one of the finest from the Fujian province. A smooth tea, rich with complex cocoa undertones, low in astringent yet rich in flavor.”

So, what if someone in your party doesn’t actually like tea? At MarieBelle (484 Broome St. between Wooster St. and West Broadway), you can choose from several elegantly titled teas—Autumn Tapestry Roibos Red, Royal English Breakfast, Blooming Heavens Chinese Flower, Dark Obsession chocolate rose, Love’s Labour lychee, Earl Grey, or Scent of the Night Jasmine—and your friend can have hot chocolate. Drop dead serious hot chocolate.

Part artisan chocolate shop (each handmade chocolate has a miniature painting on it), part Parisian café, MarieBelle is the brainchild of Maribel Lieberman. A native of Honduras, Lieberman has been drinking hot chocolate since her childhood, made the way the Aztecs and Mayans made it centuries ago—with water and ground toasted cacao seeds.

She opened MarieBelle after years of research on chocolate, including traveling to France, Belgium and Switzerland, where she discovered milk takes away the full flavor of chocolate.

“I found a shop in Paris called Angelina, and they served a very good quality hot chocolate but with milk, so I decided to make my own, including spices from an old Aztec recipe,” Lieberman said.

The Audrey Hepburn-perfect café serves teas, coffee, and hot chocolate in delicate demitasse cups. French fare includes crepes (au chocolat, Suzette, dulce de leche, strawberry compote, bananas Foster, creme fraiche with chocolate) and macarons (chocolate, coffee, pistachio, passion fruit, cassis), as well as sandwiches and salads. No pedestrian chocolate croissants here — instead, gouttes de chocolate, a crusty baguette with warm lavender-scented butter and lightly melted dark chocolate.

The Mesoamerica cacao menu is presented on a parchment-style paper placemat printed with a map of the world and a key guide indicating where each offering comes from, such as Mestizo hot chocolate (Spain), Mayan Virgin hot chocolate (Guatemala, Belize, Honduras), and Aztec King hot chocolate (Mexico).

If a crooked pinky finger isn’t your cup of tea and your mindset is more wipe-your-L.L.-Bean-boots-on-the-mat, you’ll feel right at home at Podunk (231 East Fifth St. between Second and Third avenues).

Owner Elspeth Treadwell (you can’t make this stuff up) hails from Minnesota. With her granny glasses—the lenses no bigger than quarters, salt and- pepper hair piled messily on top of her head, and chatty, come-on-in-and- take-a-load-off manner, she’s a character straight out of Lake Wobegon. Treadwell bakes everything herself, including lefse, a traditional soft Norwegian flatbread, scones, pies, cupcakes and shortbread. Even the jam is homemade. The décor, if you can call it that—you can’t—is wooden-slatted chairs and tables you’d find on the deck of a Nantucket lobster roll place, Adirondack chairs, wooden benches lined with red-striped ticking, bookshelves filled with all sorts of books, and grandmother’s attic castoffs—a pair of ice skates, a metal umbrella stand.

I am the last customer of the evening, if you don’t count the young woman who lives across the street and stopped in to dig her keys out of her bag in the shop’s bright light. Treadwell was in winding-down mode. Had I come in earlier, she said, I would have been able to see the group of Harajuku girls who come by about twice a month. “Today’s theme was snow princess,” Treadwell says.

Podunk attracts all kinds of people probably because it is so low-key. One online reviewer takes two different subways to get there. A Podunk Facebook post captures the shop’s homey gestalt and indeed the gestalt of tea itself: “Hillary and her mother came in on Saturday to have one last tea before summer. Hillary’s semester in London means we won’t have her next fall, but there was summery compensation: wild blackberry jam from their backyard and maple syrup so deep and complicated that I need to drizzle it on some Manchego cheese and figs for tea time.”