(Photos: Yuko Kodama)

South End Life: A Late-Night Tea Shop Serves Up Community, Creativity, and Wellness

Published on:

Aug 08, 2025, 10:37 pm

4 min read

Cedar Tea House offers spaces for gathering, solo work, and creativity.(Photo: Yuko Kodama)

Colorful lanterns line the counter at Cedar Tea House. Nearby are spaces to read, craft, or study, along with nooks to chat with people you meet there. The adjacent room is brighter, with pillows and rugs arranged on the floor that invite conversation or a meditative moment.

Tea house go-ers can pick up a lemon ginger rooibos tea or a salal-huckleberry mocktail with mint, with ingredients foraged earlier in the week. There's a dedicated area for kava, a nonalcoholic drink of the Pacific Islands that helps calm the nervous system. The drink is presented in a traditional manner: just kava root and water, served with a short, social "noa" ritual practice to honor the land where the medicine comes from as well as the ancestors.

Cedar Tea House — located on the west side of Rainier Avenue South near South Genesee Street, south of The Beacon Cinema — is a new late-night (5 p.m.–2 a.m.), sobriety-friendly space in the South End that prioritizes nurturing community, wellness, and creativity. Meditations and movement classes are offered regularly, as are cyphers (community sessions of spoken word/rap in an improvisational freestyle) and other events, like a recent Soul Train Dance Party.

Near the entry and drink counters is a room that offers places to sit on the floor. The area is also used for meditation and movement classes.(Photo: Yuko Kodama)

Thalay Tran, one of the tea house's founders, works the tea blends. Tran has spent her life navigating close family members' mental health issues, alcoholism, and substance abuse as people who arrived in Washington after experiencing the Secret War, the Vietnam War, colonialism, and struggle. "It's normal not to assimilate easily," she said.

Tran says growing up, she was desperate to help her mother and, later, had to address her own bout with accessing resources while navigating the trauma within the family. To recover from her personal experience with substances, Tran found a transformative modality in mindfulness in the Plum Village tradition of Buddhism. This brought her to explore wellness approaches like herbal medicine, food medicine, meditation, qigong, yoga, and other practices. She says she relied upon her experience and learning to create a space that is less based on a transactional approach and instead emphasizes reciprocity.

"To have community space where these traits of our humanity are able to be exercised and practiced and developed is a part of this tea house," Tran said.

Thalay Tran, one of the founders of Cedar Tea House, brings wellness and healing modalities to the space: "It's not about having a lot. It's more about what you bring: presence."(Photo: Yuko Kodama)

Hector Ayala, a resident of Southeast Seattle and tea house founder, mixes the mocktails. Ayala worked in a bar in Virginia that made its own bitters, tinctures, and oxymels (an herbal medicine preparation using honey, vinegar and herbs). That's where he learned to capture the essence of a plant: how to make medicine.

Later, Ayala moved to Hawai'i, where he farmed kava ("awa" in Hawaiian). Kava is a plant whose root is used by Pacific Islanders to make an herbal drink that calms the nervous system and is a sacred tonic. Ayala has worked with kava in his own transformative journey of exploring how the overuse of alcohol has affected his Mexican American immigrant family's heritage. Ayala said, "People have different specialties in life, like carpentry or service. My specialty is bringing medicine to people."

Hector Ayala is a Southeast Seattle resident and one of the founders of Cedar Tea house. Ayala does not serve the drink ceremonially at the tea house, but follows a more casual, traditional ritual — serving from a tanoa (a vessel on a legged stand to serve kava) to people at the counter who drink it from coconut shells ("apu" or "bilo"). (Photo: Yuko Kodama)

Alexia Parmer, also a founder of the Cedar Tea House, is a musician and vocalist. Parmer said, "People can go to a bar to escape or be in their own world, but here, you can be in a space with people. You can be in your own world, but it's also open for a collaborative world that we're all building together." Parmer encourages people who come into the tea house to participate in a live jam if one develops, or to get involved in conversations happening around them. Parmer welcomes the community to "come be weird, come be loud, come be colorful."

Alexia Parmer is a musician and vocalist who hopes people who come to the tea house participate in events that pop up in the space, whether it's a musical jam session, playing a board game, or having a conversation.(Photo: Yuko Kodama)

Some of the People at Cedar Tea House

Brandi Williams walked into Cedar Tea House for the evening and brought in matcha tiramisu, flowers, and a cup to donate to the shop. "This place means somewhere safe [to me]. I've had so many deep and great conversations here. Every time I come here, my faith in humanity is restored," said Williams.(Photo: Yuko Kodama)

Teddy Harada Eimon, who has been going to Cedar Tea House since its soft opening in June, beaded origami cranes together with Tran. The cranes were folded by other tea house-goers. Tran wanted to decorate the space with the cranes. As Harada Eimon, from the Central District, talked about his favorite tea (white rose), a jam session built in the other room. "I leave so charged," Harada Eimon said. "You never know what to expect."(Photo: Yuko Kodama)

Kava is Ahrod Crowley White's favorite drink at the tea house. Crowley White is a traveling musician who played guitar in a corner of the tea house. He recalled a cypher held at the tea house where people freestyled alongside instrumentals that someone there had made.(Photo: Yuko Kodama)

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Summer Therapy Resources and Arts Activities for Seattle Teens

The Seattle Department of Education and Early Learning is offering free therapy resources and arts programs for teens through Aug. 23. Learn about programs at Rainier Community Center and Rainier Beach Community Center here.