The Reset

Today started like most Wednesdays. Then Rachel arrived.

Rachel is a tea sommelier — follow her at @kindness.in.a.cup — and what was supposed to be a focused culinary class turned into nearly five hours of tasting, thinking, eating, and somewhere in the middle of it all, remembering why we started Crèm Gelato in the first place.

We tasted tea from light to dark: white tea first, gentle and almost floral, then Sencha, then Ouchong. The Ouchong from Taiwan stopped me. It had these quiet, sweet, almost dairy-like notes — warm and familiar without being obvious about it. I kept going back to it. If you've been around Crèm Gelato long enough, you might understand why.

Then Rachel pulled out something called Kalingag — the Philippine cinnamon bark. I wouldn't have tried it unprompted. But she paired it with our lunch from Jin Hokki Dumplings (Fuchi/Hocchi): Taiwanese chicken with five spice, polongchay, soy egg, and fermented spicy labanos on the side. The Kalingag hit differently against all of that. It reset the palate — completely cleared it — so I kept eating, kept tasting, kept rebuilding the flavors from zero. An odd loop. A very satisfying one.

At some point Rachel noticed something: we'd been drinking tea for hours and I hadn't left for the restroom once. She asked why. I had no real answer. Manila traffic has trained me in ways I'm only beginning to understand.

After lunch we went back to tasting, and somewhere in the slow caffeine drift of the afternoon, the conversation shifted. I started overcomplicating things — thinking out loud about how we'd use tea in formulations, what the approach would be, all the variables. Rachel stopped me. Treat it like tea, she said. Simple. Let it be what it is. She broke it down the way she breaks everything down: solid, liquid, gas. Hot, cold. When things get blurry and loud, go back to the basics.

I've been sitting with that since I got home.

We've been busy. There are always more ideas than hours at Crèm Gelato, more directions to pull in simultaneously. But today was a reminder — flavor creation is what makes us happy. It always has been. And when we do it well, it's not complicated. It tells a story. It makes you feel something you didn't expect to feel.

Something new is coming. I'm not ready to name it yet. But it starts with tea, and it starts with that idea of a reset — clearing everything away so that what comes next has room to be exactly what it should be.

We're calling it a Mystery Flavor for now. You'll be the first to know.

— Mark

P.S. Rachel wonders why I only peed three times during five hours of tea. I have been asking myself the same thing.