Dobrá Tea

Grab a cuppa before it’s too late!
Go.
You have until the end of January 2014.

This is totally a bad news.
When I first read it on their website, I didn’t want to believe it. But I talked to the waitress this evening to confirm about the news, and the news is valid. Dobra tea will soon be gone from State street, at the end of January 2014, to be precise.
Surely, this is some bad and sad news. They couldn’t survive, as the rent is too high.
Sad, sad, sad.
Delivering this news isn’t fun at all.

this place has an amazing variety of tea. the descriptions are perfect and very helpful. Pillow seats and low tables make you feel like you are far away from a midwest college town. The staff is helpful and creative. Definitely a place to visit if you love tea and a calming atmosphere.

You must try the MORROCAN TOUAREG– tastes like honey, but more mild. Delicious.
Cool space, but a little crammed & outdated. Good service.

Favorite hang out place in town!!! Awesome couches, comfy cushions and nice rattan chairs if you need to do some work.
BEST service ever! The crew are like your homies. Come here often enough and you’ll feel like it’s your home!
Tea choices are unbelievable! You can get the world at your fingertips, just bring ringing the bell!
It’s great to share with friends, and others for yourself to savor — just ask how much tea there will be!
The snacks are AWESOME! Pita anything is so good here! And the hummus sandwich! so tasty!
My favorites —
Pita Lebanon!
Chilled rooibus with honey
Chai chai chai
Tuo Cha
Qi Hong (Owner’s name! ^^)
Darjeeling first flush

Very Good tea. I had some sort of Oolong, Possibly Pai Hao, and it tasted amazing: honey like, a tad fruity, earthy, fresh and a little woody. My friend had a Pu-​erh which was excellent: a tad mossy and earthy, but over all fresh. Service? Wonderfully awkward. I think that would describe it well. Really nice when you talked to him, our host seemed a tad aloof, and sort of spacy, which wasn’t a bad thing, but just different. Overall, a great experience, and I look forward to going again.

When this place first opened, they had an extensive menu with ~50 or so teas from around the world. I recently went back and noticed that they’ve drastically abbreviated their menu. Now you can only choose from a small handful of teas. I realize this change was probably due to stocking issues, but the huge menu was a part of the appeal for me. It also justified the $ 8 a pot price — it doesn’t seem quite right to be charging that much now that they probably buy their teas in huge bulk quantities. Maybe their teas are much fresher now that they don’t have to stock so many different kinds? I honestly haven’t noticed a difference.
That being said, a teahouse is more than just the tea. This is still a great place to hang out and have great conversations.

I never fail to feel relaxed and comforted by tea here. A quiet oasis where the focus is truly on the tea, not food or coffe and tea or anything but the tea. I never have felt comfortable ringing the bell to get service, as it breaks the quiet, but that’s a completely personal pickle.

Great place for tea. They had a yellow tea (which apparently is a very unique Chinese blend that has gone in and out of popularity over the centuries — I learned this when in China and not from the tea guys here) so I was compelled to try it. It wasn’t brewed very well and was very bitter. It may have just been the yellow tea, but tea is not supposed to be bitter.
That was a little bit of a negative, but my friend and I brewed it after the staff did and I think that the flavor cleaned up a bit. It was truly an enjoyable experience, and I expect that future teas will not be served to me tasting like they’ve sat too long in the water. (not because they read this review, but because they probably don’t often make such easily avoidable mistakes) The selection of teas is great there.

Great loose leaf teas, gigantic selection.
They do ‘real’ tea, have an extremely impressive wide variety, and also sell in bulk at fair prices. 1 ounce of tea for $ 3-​$ 8 may sound steep until you realize that you’ll get 25 – 30 cups of tea, which makes it even cheaper than mass-​prepackaged bags of inferior quality.
Their Japanese teas very closely resemble what we drank in Tokyo and Kyoto, even moreso than the tea we once ordered from the Japanese tea-​import website.
Service is the usual run-​of-​the-​mill café-​quality of hung-​over undergrads. The place is also pretty uncomfortable to sit at for doing homework, which is probably partly by intent — you come here to drink tea, not study for 4 hours.
But overall, you get a quality of product here that’s even tough to find in richer cultural destinations like Chicago. I personally come here and buy 2 – 3 new teas every visit and drink them at my own pace at home. Every tea, green or black, has ‘qualities’ from relaxation to intensity. And you can really sample a spectrum of tea types here.

I love coming here to catch up with friends. They have a nice selection of tea, friendly staff, and comfy seating.
However, they lose a star because of the bell ringing. It’s extremely awkward.
Edit: Can’t believe this place is closing. I got over the bell ringing, and I can’t believe Madison will be deprived of an awesome tea place with great hours.

Horrible service, went there at a cold night at 10:17 pm and the server told us they stopped serving at 10:15pm WTF. They were clearly open till 11:00pm and knew we were new and it was really cold outside… well horrible.
Venky

How stuck up can you be? I came here for a meeting with a student, and held off on getting tea for a while. About 20 minutes in, a waitress rudely interrupts me as I’m explaining something and says in the most arrogant tone, «Are you going to get some tea or not? Because just sitting here is NOT okay.» I looked around. There were at least 5 open tables.
Now I knew I was going to get some tea, because I had a long day ahead and not a lot of sleep to keep me going. I would rather have gotten it after I finished working. But that’s certainly not happening when you treat me like a vagrant, nor do you deserve my explanation. I went to Steep and Brew and got myself a drink there instead. And I’ll be sure to let everyone I know know that they should do the same.

This place is simply amazing. I wish it were in my neighborhood – I’d be here on the reg.
The guy who was working here was polite and seemed v. knowledgeable. I felt kinda weird ringing a bell to have my order taken, like I was rudely summoning a butler or something but I guess it IS more efficient!
I had the ice tea that looks like a glass of beer and it was amazing. Everything here is beautiful. The décor is great, it doesn’t take a turn for the «cornily ethnic white people gone native» look similar establishments tend to take on.
One of the best spots on state street!

I am huge tea nerd, being into Japanese tea ceremony for years and a tea drinker since I was a wee baby sippin on milky chai, so I have a pretty firm grasp of what’s frickin’ awesome when it comes to the steeped brew.
Dobra fits the bill well. They have a small-​ish selection when it comes to black and other types of tea besides green, but they still have all the basics that one could want when going out for tea. Though they are a bit pricey, it is more a reflection of quality than of overpricing.
The staff is very knowledgeable and take the time to offer steeping advice as well as recommendations. Going in two days in a row, they remembered me and were very sweet. I felt a little weird having to ring the bell for them when I wanted to order, but it does imply that they are willing to give you all the time you need, which is nice.
The atmosphere is super relaxing and I love sitting on the raised platforms; I just feel so much more at home in a place where I don’t have to sit on a chair (although they do have that option, if you prefer.) The décor is also just exotic enough to give you a foreign-​ish feeling, but homey enough that you want to linger for hours. I wish we had a place like this up in Minneapolis.
I also tried the hummus plate and it was probably the tastiest one I’ve had out in recent memory. Crispy fresh veggies, luscious olive oil, spiceful pita… a perfect light lunch!
I brought home some Mo Li Hua Cha to remember Dobra by. I can’t wait to go back!

I’m a bit of a tea fanatic, and the creator of
so I feel I have high standards for reviewing this shop, and this place solidly earned 5 stars in my opinion.
I was very pleased to find this place. It has both normal tables, and cozy, low tables with cushions vaguely reminiscent of a Japanese aesthetic.
This place really specializes in high-​quality, straight loose tea. It’s a place you would go if you enjoy your tea without milk or sugar. The menu is large and diverse. Most importantly, the people here know how to brew tea properly – including both gong fu brewing (small, brief infusions with more leaf) and using multiple infusions western-​style (longer brewing times).
The tea here is also very good quality – which, alas, is rare here in the U.S., even among specialty tea shops. The selection is comprehensive. You can find some esoteric teas that they don’t have here if you look online, but you’ll find this place carries all of the well-​known teas and quite a few less-​well-​known ones. In particular, there’s even a good selection of oolongs, which can be hard to find in the U.S.
We had the Da Hong Pao and it was outstanding – each infusion had a totally different character.
I’m not sure why the other reviewer objected to the bells – I thought they were very cute. There is a little bell on each table and you can ring it when you want service.
Very inexpensive to drink tea in, given how knowledgeable the staff is about brewing, and how the high-​quality teas are good for making many infusions. I definitely recommend ordering a pot.
I am eagerly awaiting coming back to this place!

An insanely kind and knowledgeable staff, combined with a massive menu and a serene ambiance leads to a consistently pleasant experience at Dobra Tea.
Seating ranges from tables for two to pillow-​filled platforms that are great for small– to medium-​sized groups. The chairs and platforms don’t quite stand up to other caffeinated-​beverage houses in the area on the comfort scale, but aren’t so bad as to be uninviting.
My personal favorite is the chilled rooibos shaken with honey, and the hot chai is also really tasty. In the five or six times I’ve been there, everyone’s always been pleased with their drink and the service. The only complaint has been about the custom of ringing a bell at your table for service; though it’s nice to have time to peruse the menu and figure out what you want at your leisure, summoning the staff with a bell feels too much like calling for a servant.
On a bit of a side note, a special thanks to the lovely staff for never kicking us out, despite our inevitably inappropriate conversations and bursts of zen-​breaking laughter.

Minus the summoning bells, this place was fantastic. The lighting is soft and the ambiance is comfortable. The place was a bustling on a Sunday afternoon, with everyone from students to townies enjoying tea. People perched at small tables or sat on the floor in raised seating areas. The tea list was massive, with teas from various areas of the world and all different types. Most of the teas were in the $ 4 – 5 range and you often seemed to be able to order by the cup or pot. Small pictures on the menu offered an explanation for how many cups/​pots you could expect to get. For example, the tea I ordered was $ 4 for a cup (could be steeped 3 times), or $ 5 for a pot (could be steeped twice). A cup was more than enough for me, AND, they gave me enough hot water in my personal tea pot that I was able to refill FOUR times. I’m a wild woman, I tell ya.
My only issue (and it’s really my own) was the bell they give you when you are seated. You are to use the bell to summon the server when you are ready to order, and later, when you need more hot water. Mind you, it’s not an obnoxious bell — it’s a soft, twinkling sound… but it just felt very strange to be using it, I felt awkward and elitist.
BOTTOM LINE: If I could ditch the bell, I’d be sold. Okay. I’d go back anyways, who am I kidding. I thought the place was great.

Used to come and sit for hours with a friend and two little pots of tea. I forget the kind — a black tea, served with milk and honey. We didn’t venture too far.
The place has sooooo much potential — it would be 4 stars, but I’m not a fan of straight black, white, or green tea, so I took a star off for my personal tastes. They never made to kick us out though, which was appreciated. I enjoyed the tea and the little sitting areas, but they could used some more sturdy chairs instead.

Dobra is a quaint, cool joint in the heart of State Street. I love the location. Dobra fills the «quiet tea house» niche that had been unfilled in downtown Madison.
The décor is exotic and I liked the elevated platforms where you and your friends can sit, cross-​legged, and sip fine teas from around the world. There aren’t enough places like this in the US.
This place does have a few issues, though. First, the teas are a much pricier than I’ve seen in other loose-​leaf teashops. The selection is large, but it tended to skew toward Chinese teas, and I think could have used a few more Japanese, Indian, Sri Lankan and East African offerings. A cup of tea (which affords 3 – 5 steeps) will cost roughly $ 5, which is quite expensive.
The service was a bit slow; the first time I went, I ordered a three-​cup tasting ($ 5.28 with tax) and it took over 10 minutes to actually get the order. I wasn’t terribly impressed with any of the three: the «yellow» tea smelled of corn and was a bit too weak (normally they give a variety of green tea, but they had run out); the black tea was over-​brewed and bitter; and the puer-​eh was interesting, but not my cup of tea, to use a bad pun.
Dobra does, however, have some interesting smoked Japanese green teas and a decent selection of Chinese oolongs as well.
The cups and teapots needed a deep scrub as they were stained from previous brews. This isn’t a huge issue, but it detracted from the elegant ambience and level of sophistication that Dobra is aiming for.
I also had a baba ganouj snack ($ 7), which was delicious — well-​seasoned roasted eggplant, soft and fresh whole-​gran pita bread, all with olive oil. Once again, it’s a pricey dish, but the quality was high.
If Dobra Tea offered some vegan desserts, a more diverse tea selection, and sped up their service a bit, this place would be a gem. As it stands, it falls a little short of its full potential, but is still a worthwhile stop if you’re strolling down State Street and looking for something different than a normal coffee shop.