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A Tea Lounge for Brooklyn Heights!

By Emilia Brock
for The Brooklyn Paper
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The Brooklyn Paper file / Amy Sussman
Java jolt: This taste of Park Slope culture — the Tea Lounge — is coming to staid old Brooklyn Heights this year.

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Park Slope’s laid back, novel-writing, blog-posting, coffee-drinking culture may have finally found a beachhead in Brooklyn Heights.

The Tea Lounge, the Slope’s kid-friendly daytime coffee and teahouse, nighttime music venue and bar and all-day writers’ workshop, is looking at a vacant space at the corner of Clark and Hicks streets this year, the Brooklyn Heights Blog reported on Monday.

Despite the inevitable culture clash, Heights inhabitants are raising their mugs to the chain, looking forward to a new afternoon hangout and a subdued nightlife haunt.

From the moment the news broke, the story has been the talk of the Heights (even more than $2 tolls on the Brooklyn Bridge).

The main concern of some blog readers is that the shop will be “overflowing with kiddies,” and that another kid-friendly place pushes out adults.

“The little bastards already have their own spa,” one commenter said, referring to the Dimples Kids Spa, which opened last year on Montague Street.

College kids are another cause of distress for some, who noted that area colleges like New York University house hundreds of students in a dorm inside the St. George Hotel building.

“College students and stroller moms usually don’t mix well,” another commenter pointed out.

Tea Lounge, which has branches on Court Street in Cobble Hill and a flagship on Union Street in Park Slope, attracts introspective writers, busy mommies, and college kids alike thanks to — some say despite of — its cushy couches and free WiFi.

Yes those couches: for every online reference to the Tea Lounges’ “yummy old couches” there are at least four that refer to couches that “were found on the sidewalk and rescued before they could be taken to the landfill.”

The larger problem is that the space that the Tea Lounge is looking at occupy in Brooklyn Heights — which most recently housed the defunct Palmira’s restaurant — is a notorious dead zone.

At least seven restaurants have been in and out of that revolving door since 1982, the New York Sun reported.

Updated 04:05 pm, March, 6 2009: Story was updated to make it clear that it's not a done deal yet.

©2009 The Brooklyn Paper

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