SF tea lounge’s new menu item is a social experiment for customers

Samovar Tea Lounge's Yerba Buena Gardens location offers tea on the house — if you agree to disconnect. Samovar Tea Lounge's Yerba Buena Gardens location offers tea on the house — if you agree to disconnect. Photo: Annie Vainshtein / SFGATE Photo: Annie Vainshtein / SFGATE Image 1 of / 44 Caption Close SF tea lounge’s new menu item is a social experiment for customers 1 / 44 Back to Gallery

For the last month, Samovar Tea Lounge has been stealthily crafting a social experiment.

The "third-wave" tea shop has added a loaded item to its artisan menu: mindfulness tea. It comes with a set of instructions: A patron is to take 60 minutes to enjoy the tea, a period in which they must detach from all technology. Phones are to be turned off and placed in your bag. No talking to anyone other than your server. If you make it through the mindful hour, the tea is free.

Jesse Jacobs, founder of Samovar, said the idea grew out of his personal interest in the psychological benefits of meditation and concern for the artifice of connectivity in an ever-digital world.

"I've been doing a decent amount of reading on psychology and business and productivity, and it turns out that phones, and everything they represent, are qualities of distraction," Jacobs said. "I would go so far as to name distraction as the number one enemy of happy, healthy, and successful living."

Jacobs said he thought introducing the item would be an interesting test — what would happen if undivided attention, focus, and a dedication to a single, present hour was forced on people?

"People are pretty much incapable of sitting or being or waiting in line or going for a walk undistracted," Jesse Jacobs, founder of Samovar said. "I believe it's because it requires a reflection, and reflection is often painful because people aren't happy."

Tyler Byrne, the general manager at Samovar's Yerba Buena location, said most people see the item on the menu and decide to come back later, when they can afford to spend the time. It's not particularly enforced, but it's an earnest offering. If someone has to leave after 45 minutes in good faith, Byrne says, Samovar will most likely cover the cost.

"It's an honor system," Jacobs said. "If you're going to come in and try and take advantage of us... go for it."

They're more concerned with the net moral effect of this experiment. In the next couple months, Samovar will also begin to offer mindfulness/meditation tea tasting classes. The mindfulness tea will likely make it to the lounge's other locations, in the Fillmore and in the Mission.

The point, thus far, has been to create a space for unadorned reflection, taking "friction and effort and cost out of it."

"This is a very sneaky way of teaching people the skill of observation."