Just across the street from the airport Monday morning, in the
center of an industrial park, Christy Estrada sits sipping tea from
a floral-printed china cup rimmed with gold, occasionally tipping
the petite matching teapot for a refill.
”
We’re drinking Valentine’s tea in honor of Valentine’s Day,
”
she says.
”
It has flavors of rosebuds and chocolate. You probably won’t
even need to put sugar in it.
”
Hollister – Just across the street from the airport Monday morning, in the center of an industrial park, Christy Estrada sits sipping tea from a floral-printed china cup rimmed with gold, occasionally tipping the petite matching teapot for a refill.
“We’re drinking Valentine’s tea in honor of Valentine’s Day,” she says. “It has flavors of rosebuds and chocolate. You probably won’t even need to put sugar in it.”
Estrada, the owner of Someone’s in the Kitchen, has learned over the years to define teas like this. She attends a yearly tea conference in Las Vegas; she knows the plantations where all her teas come from; she knows which families grow them in which countries around the world. She can tell you which teas clear up her mind, which ones help her focus, which ones make her feel relaxed. She can tell you how long loose-leaf tea needs to steep; she can tell you what kind of teacup to use; she can tell you that you never microwave a coffee mug full of water and a bag of powdered leaves and call it tea.
What she can’t tell you is exactly how she went from selling baked goods on her front lawn to being the owner-chef-baker-waitress-dishwasher-literature aficionado at Hollister’s only tea shop-bakery-cafe-bookstore.
She sells the books because Hollister is deprived of a true bookstore, she says. She offers the cafe food because man cannot live on bread alone. And the bread and pastries she bakes because, well, she just needs to.
“I just seem to have to bake,” she says, not with a sigh but with an excitement in her normally calm voice. “When I was growing up (in Newport Beach), we lived down the street from a large Mormon family. Every Thursday the mother would bake nine loaves of wheat bread, and I quickly learned that Thursday was a good day to go over and ask if their daughter Lucille could come out and play.
“I asked my mom if she would bake bread and she said ‘No way,’ and I decided right there that I would learn how to bake so that my house would always be filled with that wonderful smell.”
Eventually, Estrada’s need to bake became overwhelming to the point where “my family couldn’t eat everything I needed to bake,” she said. So she set up a table of pastries and breads on her front lawn on a busy street corner on Saturday mornings as an experiment. Soon cars were making illegal U-turns to come buy goodies and small children were knocking at her door early Saturday mornings saying their mothers wanted to know if she’d be selling again that day. But her set-up was so “blatantly illegal,” she says with a laugh, that after nine or ten weeks she began packing up a little red wagon with baked goods and selling door-to-door. Her kids were horribly embarrassed and even her dog thought she was crazy, she says. But her kids are grown and moved away now, and she’s pretty sure her dog has gotten over it, too.
Three years ago Estrada finally bought the industrial park storefront that is now Someone’s in the Kitchen, a tiny restaurant charmingly cluttered with tables, bookshelves, Parisian-inspired art and beautiful teapots for sale. Here, Estrada single-handedly prepares home-cooked lunches, bakes breads and pastries from scratch, recommends novels for locals to pick up from her bookshelves and hosts tea party/book club meetings every month.
Nowhere else in a small farming town can one browse books, feast on homemade soups and sandwiches and discuss “Epitaph for a Peach” over high tea, and Estrada knows that. She knows tea-time and high quality mean not only an untapped market, but an unmet need.
“So much of what taking tea is about is that you don’t just take a cup of tea and run,” she says. “Tea-time is in itself a time of relaxation, and we need that so badly these days. The people that come in here, they’re just so delighted to have their tea served this way. I tell people when they make tea at home to always use their best tea service, and to take their time and sit down and enjoy it.”
While her customers relax over their tea and books, Estrada keeps herself busy. She’s the only employee at Someone’s in the Kitchen, and does everything from ordering the selection of books to washing the dishes to coming in early in the morning to bake bread before lunchtime. People don’t come into Someone’s in the Kitchen expecting quick service on their 20-minute lunch break, she says. They understand that there’s no written menu because Estrada scours the local farms and harbors to find the freshest greens and fish every week, and bases the menu on what’s fresh that day. Customers come in ready to wait for the quality, ready to wait for Estrada to prepare each dish individually; to slice the oranges she’ll use to garnish a plate only when it is ordered; to make sure each meal is presented perfectly.
But before Estrada starts her work, she always comes into the shop, sits down at one of the five small tables, and has a pot of tea. Always a tea chosen specifically for her mood that morning, always with her best china tea service, never in a rush.
“I long to have something like this,” she says.
And if you do, too, Estrada says, Someone’s in the Kitchen is the place to go.
“You can go to a big-box store or the supermarket and buy a tin of tea. But can they tell you about it and tell you how to make it? They can’t say ‘Here’s my phone number; if you go home and you just can’t get it right give me a call and I’ll walk you through it.'”
