Stepping inside TeaLee’s Tea House & Bookstore in Five Points gives one the sense of visiting a beloved aunty’s house. It’s the place to bring your mom for afternoon tea, or come in for a cozy solo bite. But owner Risë Jones (pronounced “REE-sah”) also offers visitors a sultry side downstairs, where intimate jazz shows, poetry slams, and readings take place. It also houses the small bookstore, chockfull of Black authors from around the world.
What TeaLee’s Brings to Five Points
Jones officially opened the doors in February, 2018. The name TeaLee’s comes from a nickname given to Jones’s grandmother, Evelyn Jones, aka T-Lee. Ironically, Evelyn was not a tea drinker. Though she did love drinking coffee out of a delicate bone china tea cup.
“TeaLee’s was named after my grandmother because I’d say her house was always a place of good food, wisdom, and conversation,” said Jones. “She could take the most basic thing and just make it taste good, and then she always, always, always had something that she could just share [with visitors].”
That kind of communal vibe remains important to Jones. She loves to feed people, host groups, celebrate local wins, and be part of the neighborhood where she grew up.
While tea is the obvious focus of the Five Points spot, visitors can also find coffee, tea-based cocktails and mocktails, hot chocolate, wine by the glass, and beer. There’s also a robust food program thanks to chef Riyan McNeal, a recent hire who is revamping the menu.
Think freshly-made, individual, broccoli cheddar or salmon quiches. There’s a Loaded Grilled Cheese on the menu featuring cranberry-walnut bread filled and grilled with aged white cheddar and a spicy red pepper jam. The Vegan Bar-B-Que Toastie uses jackfruit to give it heft and comes lovingly spiced.
The shop boasts an excellent afternoon and high tea service. Each order includes a bottomless pot of tea, delicate tea sandwiches, scones, lemon curd, jam, and Devonshire cream. It also comes with Miss Peabody’s Southern Tea Cakes (the sweet potato ones are outstanding). If you opt for the high tea, it comes with all that and a meal course.
The evolution TeaLee’s is going through also includes price changes, which is why we aren’t listing the current rates. The shop hasn’t upped prices in years, if ever, and needs to start reflecting the rising cost of ingredients and the overall overhead of running a hospitality business in 2025, something Jones hopes her customers will understand.
On the tea side, Jones plans on blending her own in order to make signature flavors and guarantee chemicals and artificial ingredients stay out of the cup. It’s an ongoing goal and right now you can taste her tea brilliance in Yellow Submarine, an herbal concoction, or tisane, featuring chamomile flowers, mango, and pineapple.
“It’s the pure ingredients you just have to get from the distributor or the places where you’re getting the pure tea,” said Jones, explaining why she decided to start making her own tea blends. Before, she added, she loved getting Allegro Tea to stock the shelves, but that changed after the company was bought by Whole Foods that in turn, was bought by Amazon. Now, Jones sources from various outlets as she works on the upcoming beverage program.
Currently the tea menu offers many types from black to green to oolong. The herbal tea section has plenty of options, and for those who love coffee but want tea, try the pu’er. If you don’t know what you might like, often Jones and McNeal are there and ready to help you discover a new favorite.
From Corporate Work to Illness to TeaLee’s
Despite loving what she does at TeaLee’s, running a tea shop certainly wasn’t the original plan for Jones. Her dad’s side of the family is from Little Rock, Arkansas where her grandfather was an entrepreneur on Ninth Street. He and his brothers owned a pool hall, a restaurant, and a hotel in town. Her mother hails from Kansas, and Jones herself is a first generation Coloradan.
Before tea, Jones was stationed in Branson, Missouri and her work revolved around training, development, and meeting planning in corporate settings. But after she got diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia in her bone marrow, her life changed and she moved back to Denver. Around 2012 she had a bone marrow transplant and then was off work for two years.
For a month Jones’ doctors sealed her off from germs and the world. She likened it to the 1976 movie The Boy In the Plastic Bubble, a story inspired by real life cases of David Vetter and Ted DeVita.
“I was figuring out what I was going to do, and I couldn’t work for two years because my immune system was compromised,” she said. “It’s like survival, and it literally took like, six months until I felt like I was even semi-normal.”
It was going to see The Neville Brothers perform at Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder in July, 2012 that got Jones feeling alive and ready to do something for herself. So, she started planning a tea house with her husband, Louis Freeman.
Jones found inspiration for the plan through Wystone’s World Teas and its founder, Wy “Ms. Teas” Livingston, an African American woman who launched the Lakewood company and tea house in 2006. Jones spent some time working there and learning about tea. The shop closed years ago, but Livingston’s influence lives on through TeaLee’s.
The Long Wait and a New Chef
Though the shop officially opened in 2018, Jones actually signed the lease in 2015. It took over two years of work to get the historic building in working order, and to procure the permits needed to start the business. During that period Jones did what she could to keep afloat and not give up the dream. She drove for Lyft, took a weekend job at Nocturne Jazz & Supper Club, and even did holiday retail work. A GoFundMe page launched and then finally, TeaLee’s opened. The next year the pandemic hit, so Jones pivoted again. Now, five years later, she’s changing it up and chef McNeal is happy to help take over the kitchen.
“I fell in love with the place when I came in here,” said McNeal, who started to frequent the shop after the first visit. “I was like, yo, I’m going to work back here, whether it’s part time, full time, whatever.”
McNeal’s trial by fire was more a trial by rice. Jones was hosting an event and decided to make jambalaya for it. McNeal took on rice duty and, despite a bag of seasoning breaking, the dish came out perfect.
“I fell in love with her,” laughed Jones. “I was like, this woman has hustle, and she can cook rice.”
Not only that, but she cooked it in a bowl, in the oven. No pans were available at the time, shrugged the chef. While events like that don’t happen all the time, McNeal is at TeaLee’s to stay, whipping up delights and helping Jones get out of the kitchen to do things she’s meant to do for years. For example, the anticipated house-blended tea program.
Between the two women the energy buzzes with possibility and joy. As cliche as it sounds, that happiness translates to the cup and plate, steeping into everyone who walks in.
Visit TeaLee’s Tea House & Bookstore Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. 611 22nd St., Denver, tealeesdenverteahouse.com
