Steeped in time
For three years, Bar.Flora built its identity on a single, elegant idea: the intersection of gin and tea, two botanical-forward worlds pushed up against each other in one glass. It was Metro Manila’s answer to the classic G&T, reimagined as Gin & Tea, and it made the Tomas Morato bar one of the city’s most talked-about openings.
But behind that pairing was always a quieter truth—tea had shaped the way the Bar.Flora team experienced food, travel, and hospitality long before it ever shared a bar menu with gin.
Tea house by day, tea bar by night
That quieter half now has a home of its own. Flora Tea Bar has opened at 27 Annapolis, Greenhills—the newest concept from the Bar.Flora team and, as they say, the first homegrown tea house in the Philippines.
It is not a replacement for the original bar, nor is it a rebrand. Bar.Flora remains open at 49 Scout Rallos in Tomas Morato—though now recast as a dedicated gin bar built around the country’s most extensive gin collection and a women-centered cocktail experience. Flora Tea Bar, meanwhile, gives tea the space it had “long deserved,” and, in the words of brand director Denise Fajardo, a space of its own.
“Bar.Flora was always built around the intersection of tea and cocktails as two botanical-forward concepts,” she explains. “The original Bar.Flora at Scout balanced the gin and tea act since 2023.”
That balancing act ran for three years before the opportunity arose to separate the two ideas properly. “Good fortune gave us a chance to split the two concepts after three years by finding the perfect location in Greenhills and bringing Flora Tea Bar into fruition,” Fajardo says. The new space at 27 Annapolis operates as a tea house by day and a tea bar by night, and across both modes, the philosophy stays consistent.
The two siblings now run on parallel but distinct tracks—one loud and botanical-forward with gin at its core, the other quiet, contemplative, and steeped in tea.
A space built around tea
The idea for Flora Tea Bar didn’t arrive in a single flash of inspiration. “It happened gradually through travel,” Fajardo recalls. “Over the years, our team spent a lot of time in places with deep tea cultures like Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and Japan.”
“Some of our most memorable travel moments weren’t in famous restaurants or bars,” she adds. “They were in small tea houses, sitting quietly over tea with friends, or discovering a new tea varietal that instantly became tied to a specific place and memory.”
Those small, unplanned moments started to add up. “We started bringing teas home from every trip and realized that tea creates a very different kind of experience—slower, more reflective, and often more personal,” she says. “We knew in our hearts that the tea experience deserved its own dedicated space.”
Eventually, that feeling crystallized into a direct question: What would it look like to build a space around tea from the very beginning, rather than folding it into something else?
Infusing a tea culture into the Philippines
Tea is hardly a novelty in the Philippines. Matcha lattes and milk tea shops have made the category more visible than ever, particularly among younger drinkers. But visibility, Fajardo argues, is not the same as depth. “There are still very few places dedicated to tea as a craft in the same way specialty coffee or cocktails are treated,” she says.
That gap is the space Flora Tea Bar is trying to occupy—not by rejecting popular formats but by building an on-ramp into something deeper. “We wanted to create a place where people could explore tea more deeply,” Fajardo says. “Different origins, different preparations, different traditions, and different ways of interpreting tea.”
To make that exploration feel approachable rather than academic, Flora Tea Bar has assembled a roster of tea mentors—practitioners, educators, sommeliers, and artisans drawn from different tea cultures. Through workshops, tastings, and informal conversation, the mentors guide guests through everything from basic tea appreciation to mindful matcha preparation, tea-and-food pairing, deep dives into traditions, and focused sessions on specialty grades such as gyokuro.
The choice of neighborhood is also deliberate. Greenhills carries strong modern Chinese roots and a long-standing community identity, which makes it, in Fajardo’s view, the only logical home for the country’s first dedicated tea house.
There’s also a quieter, more local story behind the specific address. “Annapolis is a long-forgotten street given the huge mall development in central Greenhills,” Fajardo notes. “Establishing the tea house and bar here is somewhat a move to revive modern shop houses.” It’s a neighborhood built for lingering—for the kind of unhurried, all-afternoon wandering, eating, and browsing that Greenhills has become known for.
Creating a new generation of tea drinkers
Beyond the philosophy, Flora Tea Bar backs its ambitions with a genuinely deep tea program. Guests can order the brand’s now-familiar signature matcha and hojicha drinks to go, but the real draw is a substantial loose-leaf tea collection sourced directly from producers in China, Taiwan, and Japan—meant to be savored Gongfu style, the traditional Chinese method of steeping small amounts of tea in short, repeated infusions.
“The vision is to create a new generation of tea drinkers,” Fajardo says of the program. Alongside the leaf tea, the bar’s beverage leadership team—all graduates of tea tender and connoisseur certification programs—has developed a line of tea wines inspired by discoveries the team made in Taipei and Fukuoka and reimagined for the Manila menu.
Flora Tea Bar’s operating hours are structured to mirror the way tea itself moves through a day—slow mornings easing into an afternoon ritual, then shifting gears for evening service. Lunch runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., built around what the brand calls a lotus-centered lunch menu. Afternoon tea takes over from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
And from 6 p.m. until late, the space transitions into full tea-bar mode, with dinner service and tea-forward cocktails on offer.
Start it slow
For guests walking in for the first time, Fajardo’s advice is simple: Don’t rush the menu. “We recommend experiencing it the way we designed it: start with tea,” she says. “Order one of our signature tea drinks and take your time with it. From there, move into tea snacks or stay for a tea cocktail.”
Where Bar.Flora’s space leans into energy and spectacle; Flora Tea Bar is designed to do the opposite. The space is deliberately quieter and more contemplative, with the sound of water woven into the room specifically to calm ambient noise and encourage guests to slow down.
That design instinct comes from a broader read on where hospitality has drifted. “Life moves very quickly now, and so much of hospitality is built around stimulation and excitement,” Fajardo says. “We wanted to create the opposite: a space that feels calming, reflective, and restorative.”
That sense of restoration is arguably the boldest bet Flora Tea Bar is making—that in a city known for its fast-moving, high-stimulation dining scene, a genuinely slow, unhurried format can still find an audience willing to linger.
“More than anything, it feels like a privilege,” Fajardo says of the opening. “What started as a small concept has grown into something that people genuinely care about. The most rewarding part isn’t the expansion itself. It’s seeing a community form around the ideas that Flora stands for: curiosity, hospitality, creativity, and a female-led perspective on food and drink.”
Flora Tea Bar is open at 27 Annapolis, Greenhills. To reserve a table, DM @florateabar. Bar.Flora is at 49 Scout Rallos, Tomas Morato. To reserve, DM @floraginbar
6 major categories of true tea
1. White tea: made from minimally processed young buds and leaves that were withered and dried with little oxidation. Its flavor profile is subtle, delicate, and light.
2. Green tea: leaves that are heated quickly after picking to stop oxidation. The flavor profile is fresh, vegetal, and grassy.
3. Yellow tea: similar to green tea, but with an added slow-drying step that allows the leaves to yellow before drying. The flavor profile is smooth and mellow—an in-between of white and green tea.
4. Oolong tea: partially oxidized leaves with a flavor profile that sits between green and black tea. Lightly oxidized variants lean more toward floral, creamy, and sweet notes, while heavily roasted styles taste nutty, woody, and caramelly.
5. Black tea: fully oxidized leaves that come in a dark color, with a flavor profile that is more robust, full-bodied, and bold. It is commonly used as a base for milk teas and iced teas.
6. Dark tea: a tea variant (like pu-erh) that undergoes microbial fermentation and is likewise aged for months, or even sometimes years. The flavor profile is earthy, deep, and complex.
