The Project
Shizuku has the opportunity to address something still largely missing from London's tea landscape: a place where exceptional tea, cultural depth, and contemporary hospitality come together with equal care, without compromising one for another.
The ambition is not simply to source exceptional teas for opening, but to build the foundations for a new reference point for tea in London — grounded in the origins, people and knowledge behind tea, while entirely relevant to contemporary life.
Shizuku's creative framework of Heat, Water, Air and Light is already established. Rui's work will build on this foundation, translating it into tea and developing the knowledge, sourcing relationships, standards, and practical systems required to carry the programme from concept through to opening.
The revised brief now encompasses a considerably wider tea offering: the four Elemental Teas, Simbi's Selection, premium teas, Shizuku Breakfast Tea, potential retail applications and tea used within cocktails. These cannot be developed effectively as separate sourcing exercises. Each decision affects the others — across flavour and aroma, sensory experience, provenance, cost, continuity, stock, brewing, service and how guests encounter tea throughout Shizuku.
The programme will therefore begin with Tea Programme Architecture: establishing how these different expressions of tea belong together before making individual sourcing decisions. This foundation will inform sourcing and development, brewing and service, knowledge and training, and finally implementation in the space.
