There's a sign next to where they brew the tea at Teavana. It reads:

Some call it steeping to perfection. We call it pre-boarding for your tea journey.

I saw that and thought: funny. My mum calls it "mashing".

Anyway, Teavana, America's first purpose-built tea bar, backed by Starbucks and newly opened on New York's Upper East Side, is reassuringly hilarious. I mean, it's rather nice, in its own way: soft lighting, warm colours, attentive staff pressing upon you free samples of that flavoured tea that tastes like a bit like hot Ribena. It has an extensive range, and some pretty-looking cakes. It's very clean.

But it's just so crushingly pointless. It's a tea bar (it serves no coffee), but it acts more like a determinedly ambitious boutique hotel. You're welcomed at the front door by staff in uniform, presented with a menu card, encouraged to take in the surroundings. They – this is true – actually gift-wrapped my Chelsea bun.

It's easy to mock – boy, is it easy to mock – but Teavana, with all its new-age, pseudo-spiritual bullshit, points to a wider trend: what you might call America's fetishisation of tea. Since when did tea become part of a marketable lifestyle? The questions in New York's cafés are always the same: black or green? Hold or cold? Kale or quinoa? Gay or straight? And once you've finished this back-and-forth, what do you end up with?

A rather forlorn-looking cup of tepid water into which the bag has yet to be introduced.

What Teavana tells us is: tea is now a drink for America's boujis. Construction workers and delivery men, stick to your Dunkin's coffee – your calloused hands and peanut brains probably can't handle something so chichi. We are tea drinkers, not barbarians: we're creative, alternative, organic, sustainable. We play the oboe in our spare time; we make our own hummus. We're caffeine-free, and we all went to Oberlin – and we're gonna make a big deal about ourselves.

Well, I call foul. This is tea we're talking about! Delicious, refreshing, normal tea! With milk! In a china cup!

There's really nothing better. Some of life's best bits come with a nice cup of tea attached: on the sofa watching the first morning of a Test match, with a cream scone in an English country garden, in a museum café when your parents come to visit. Tea accompanies life's most important moments. Just imagine the scene:

Mum, I've just failed my A-levels. "Oh, love. I'll stick the kettle on. Chai latte all right?"

I know: everyone has their own tastes and mores, and who am I, really, to say that Mandarin Oolong or Coconut Mango Sakura Allure™ isn't worth the mug it's brewed in?

I also don't say this as a heathen: good quality tea is essential to making the perfect cup. My dad, for example, wouldn't have PG in the house. (Co-op Indian Prince, actually. Very underrated.)

It's just that one of the great virtues of tea, as drunk conventionally in Britain with milk, is its simplicity, its unshowiness. There's a certain art to making a great cup of tea, but the point is anyone can do it. Teavana shows us the folly of over-complicating things. Tea is a fine, versatile drink on its own, and doesn't need pumpkin spice, or lavender sage, or Polonium 210, or whatever, to prosper.

It just needs boiling water – and it must be boiling: I really can't emphasise that enough, America – and it needs time. To do it any other way is to diminish it.

I get it: it's all about the coin. Starbucks may profess to love coffee, but what it really loves is money: revenues of $3.8bn in the last quarter. It has conquered coffee; why not do the same with tea? And when you're charging $5.95 for a "craft tea fusion" – answers on a postcard, please – you're laughing all the way to the bank.

But please, enough with the preciousness. Tea doesn't deserve this – it's doing just fine, thanks. A working kettle, some boiling water, a decent bag and a splash of milk: simple, but devastatingly effective. Sometimes, the best things really don't need any embellishment. And unless the "tea journey" involves drinking too much at a motorway service station and having to turn off at the next exit for a wee – I think I'll pass.