Broken Cup Teahouse imports a relaxing, tea-forward experience into Kendall Square
For a special occasion, it’s hard to find a more transporting daytime spot nearby
★★★★☆½
Broken Cup Teahouse
Tea, $$$
245 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02139
Thursday to Friday 10:30 a.m.–6 p.m.
Saturday to Sunday 11 a.m.–12:30 p.m., 1 p.m.–2:30 p.m., 3 p.m.–4:30 p.m.
Broken Cup Teahouse, a new tea room in Kendall Square, takes its name from a story about the Buddhist teacher Ajahn Chah. One clever disciple, in the middle of a lesson on detachment and the impermanence of all things, interrupts Chah to ask, “But what about your favorite teacup — the one you always use?” The teacher smiles and explains: “In my mind, the cup is already broken. Making my peace with its fate, I can savor every sip.”
It’s a potent metaphor for running a small business, and Broken Cup is about as small as a business can get. Taking up a couple hundred square feet in the middle of a twelfth-floor Kendall Square co-working space, the tea room has no doors, no ceiling, and, by my calculations, roughly two-and-a-half walls.
Finding it can be more puzzling than a zen koan. To get there, my fellow tea taster and I navigated three sets of doors, two elevators, an iPad kiosk, and a doorbell. We swapped our shoes for clean felt slippers and scooched up to our shin-height table on a pair of round leather seat cushions (Broken Cup, which can accommodate up to five private parties at once, also has regular table seating). Office workers peered in as they hustled out to lunch.
Although the space is not totally private, it felt cozy, especially after our tea host, the only employee on shift, put on quiet jazz and gave us a moment to consider the menu. Broken Cup offers 20 single-origin teas, each of which can be served either in a conventional pot or gongfu style, in which tea is repeatedly flash-brewed in a small, lidded bowl, called a gaiwan. More gongfu teahouses are scheduled to open in Cambridge soon, but right now, Broken Cup is the only one.
We opted for a house selection of three oolong teas served gongfu style (the “tea adventure for two”). After receiving a quick intro to technique, we brewed at our own pace for the rest of our hour-and-a-half session. We also received a small box of tea snacks, including passionfruit white chocolates, roasted almonds, honey dates, sponge cake, and a standout shortbread, which is baked by Cafe Soupcon for Broken Cup Teahouse with their Dark Honey Black Tea, and encrusted with dried osmanthus flowers.
Our tea host suggested that we pay attention to the three distinct attributes of tea: aroma, flavor, and body. The teas we tried were exceptional on each count. We chose the “light” selection, and the lightest oolong we tried, the light-jade Orchid Dew Baozhong, smelled like fresh-cut flowers. It layered fruit-floral crispness over a classic grassy matcha flavor — not too grassy, our tea master told us, because it was blended with creamier leaves harvested a few days later.
The Honey Orchid was a more traditional oolong, darker and more oxidized. Hints of roasted peaches and apples hid behind a lovely tea flavor, clear in the nose and on the tongue. My favorite was the Swann’s Way, an oolong that was aged for almost 30 years, origin and cultivar unknown. My companion — a former professional chef — immediately noticed the rich body, oily and almost like coffee. We sat for a couple of minutes trying to decide what, exactly, it tasted like. Although we gave up, it was so good that I bought a bag for myself.
The quality is no accident. Broken Cup’s owner, Yin Guan, regularly travels to East Asia to connect with individual tea makers. Guan holds a masters in Buddhist studies, and started Broken Cup as a pop-up teahouse in 2022, holding tea events and classes at venues around Boston. The tea room itself was carved out of unused space in the Cambridge Innovation Center. During the pandemic, the room was left empty, and the Center never regained the bandwidth to find a full-time use for it. After holding some pop-ups in the space, Guan asked if she could open a long-term tea house in the space. She inherited the furniture and brought her own teaware, which is beautiful and, unlike the titular cup, entirely intact.
It’s hard to ignore Broken Cup’s unusual setting, but it’s also hard not to find it charming, like a friend’s hobby room that’s been tidied up for company. It’s filled with solid wood and warm light, patterned plant pots and piles of books. Week-old birthday balloons to celebrate the tea room’s first anniversary still hang in the far corner. While we sipped and chatted, our tea host quietly weighed and bagged tea for online sale, and filled up an extra pot from a spigot hooked up to five-gallon water jugs that were sitting on the floor. Once the tea started kicking in, I felt more relaxed than I could have imagined was possible on the top floor of a Kendall Square office building.
Although I found myself smiling the whole five-minute walk back to campus from Broken Cup, most students will not find it very accessible. Besides the labyrinthine entrance, it costs $15 just to reserve a private table (though a communal table is free to book). Our service for two ran $82, not counting tip. For a special occasion, however, it’s hard to find a more transporting daytime spot in Kendall Square. Broken Cup also sells many of its delicious teas at reasonable — if upscale — prices, both in person and online.