By Elena Kadvany
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About this blog: I am a perpetually hungry twenty-something journalist, born and raised in Menlo Park and currently working at the Palo Alto Weekly as education and youth staff writer. I graduated from USC with a major in Spanish and a minor in jo...
(More)About this blog: I am a perpetually hungry twenty-something journalist, born and raised in Menlo Park and currently working at the Palo Alto Weekly as education and youth staff writer. I graduated from USC with a major in Spanish and a minor in journalism. Though my first love is journalism, food is a close second. I am constantly on the lookout for new restaurants to try, building an ever-expanding "to eat" list. As a journalist, I'm always trolling news sources and social media websites with an eye for local food news, from restaurant openings and closings to emerging food trends. When I was a teenager growing up in Menlo Park, I always drove up to the city on weekends with the singular purpose of finding a better meal than I could at home. But in the past year or so, the Peninsula's food culture has been totally transformed, with many new restaurants opening and a continuous stream of San Francisco restaurants coming south to open Peninsula outposts. Don't navigate this food boom hungry and alone! Feed me your tips on new chefs and eats and together we'll share them with the broader community.
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Of-age fans of Redwood City cafe Teaquation's tea-based drinks, rejoice: They will be available as alcoholic cocktails at a new Palo Alto location opening next year.
Teaquation owner Mercedes Mapua has taken over 115 Hamilton Ave., the former home of Spot A Pizza Place. The pizzeria
closed in November.
About half of the menu at Teaquation No. 2 will be different from the Redwood City cafe, Mapua said. There will still be drinks from made from fresh-steeped tea, fruits and homemade ingredients, such as the "Scandal" (hibiscus and black tea with grapes, grapefruit and lemon) and the "Orange is the New Black" (Thai tea topped with housemade honey, coconut, sea salt and whipped cream), but also ones with beer and wine. Look for sorbet with champagne or sangria. Mapua also plans to serve "really good, hard-to-find Italian wines."
Above: Teaquation' take on Thai iced tea. Photo courtesy Mercedes Mapua.
Food-wise, there will be a wide range: toasts, gourmet hot dogs, housemade macarons and other "brunch-ish style food," she said.
Mapua, a former designer for technology companies,
opened Teaquation in 2016. The concept, though originally sans alcohol, was inspired by the concept of mixology, she said at the time.
"The idea behind mixology is to keep customers' palates dancing between two or three tastes -- sweet, tart, maybe bitter," she said.
Mapua said she aims to open more Teaquation locations down the line.
