Song Tea & Ceramics

Peter Luong grew up in San Francisco's Richmond District inside his family's traditional Chinese apothecary, then spent years working at Red Blossom Tea, the Chinatown tea shop his parents had opened, before starting Song Tea & Ceramics in 2013. The name comes from the 9th-century Song Dynasty, a period of Chinese art and culture Luong treats as a reference point for both the tea and the ceramics the shop sells alongside it.

Luong makes twice-yearly sourcing trips to China and Taiwan, deliberately looking for teas that present a real tasting challenge rather than safe, familiar profiles, and the tea studio in Lower Pacific Heights doubles as a showroom for handmade ceramic teaware chosen with the same eye. The operation stays intentionally small — a five-person team handling both the tea program and the ceramics curation.

Having grown up inside one Chinatown tea business before building his own more design-forward one two decades later, Luong's shop reads as a second generation refining what the first one started.