Where This Started

I remember the tea box from when I was a kid. It said the tea was from Kenya. That's the tea I grew up on — the kind that turns a deep, caramel color the second milk hits it. When I moved to the U.S., I couldn't find it anywhere. Grocery shelves had a hundred kinds of tea, and none of them were that one.  

So I stopped waiting for someone else to bring it in. If it was Kenyan then, it's Kenyan now — granulated, not leaf, which is what gives it the strength to hold up against milk instead of going pale. I found it in Kenya and brought it here myself, under a company I registered and named Dastarkhan.

The name came last, and it explained everything. A dastarkhan is the tablecloth that covers the ground, the floor, or a low table — a Persian and Turkic word, literally. But it grew beyond the cloth itself: today it means the whole spread laid on top of it — the food, the arrangement, the people gathered around it. Offering tea is how you invite someone to sit down at it.

Dastarkhan L.L.C. is based in San Francisco, California. It's new and it runs on passion for good tea.
Come try it with us — there's always a room at the table.