Interview with Pier Paolo & Francesco — Tea Lovers Collective

Introduction

When I first met Pier Paolo and Francesco at the inaugural Vienna Tea Festival in 2024, it was clear that something special was happening. Behind the festival was not simply another tea event but a growing community of people eager to discover tea through conversation, education, and shared experiences.

Over the past two years, it has been inspiring to watch Vienna's tea scene flourish. Often overshadowed by its world-famous coffeehouse culture, the Austrian capital has quietly become home to an increasingly diverse network of tea houses, educators, artisans, and enthusiasts. Tea Lovers Collective has played no small part in that transformation.

This year, I am delighted to return for the third edition of the Vienna Tea Festival, where I will be leading a workshop of my own. Before gathering once again around the tea table, I wanted to sit down with the two people behind Tea Lovers Collective to explore how it all began.

There is a certain irony—and perhaps something beautifully European—about the fact that one of Vienna's most dynamic tea communities was founded by two Italians. In this conversation, Pier Paolo and Francesco reflect on their personal journeys into tea, the challenges of building a community from the ground up, and how a simple meetup evolved into one of Europe's most exciting tea festivals.

Lorela: Before Tea Lovers Collective, there were two individuals with their own stories. Pier Paolo and Francesco, can you each take us back to the moment tea first became more than just a beverage? Was there a specific tea, place, or encounter that changed everything?

Francesco: There wasn’t really a specific moment. Since childhood, I associated tea with the lovely daily gatherings with my grandmother and my aunties, where tea itself was not just a beverage, but a moment of connection, pleasant conversations, and shared time together.

PierPaolo: I was living in Paris and went to a tea exhibition at the asian art museum Musée Guimet. That got me curious enough to sign up for a class at Palais des Thés. The class is what did it. There wasn't one magical cup; it was more that I realised how much Asian culture fascinated me, and tea was the way in.

Lorela: As Italians, tea is not necessarily the first beverage people associate with your culture. How did your personal journeys lead you from Italy into the world of speciality tea, and eventually to Vienna?

PierPaolo: Italians drink coffee, that's the cliché, and it's mostly true. My route into tea was just circumstantial. After Paris, I moved to Milan to study and ended up living near La Teiera Eclettica. I got to know the owners, started working there through my studies, and that's where I actually learned: by serving customers, tasting teas and learning how a tea business is run. I also started travelling to Asia when I could, which filled in the gaps. Vienna came later for personal reasons, not tea reasons. I'd already been into tea for years by the time I got here. I met Francesco through Instagram. Two Italians in Vienna, both into tea, it was bound to happen. I helped with his Tea Lovers events, and when he left Vienna, I took it over.

Francesco: When I became serious about tea, I was already living in Vienna, but it all happened very independently. It started from a personal desire to explore tea more deeply, through online research, buying teas online, and tasting them on my own. At first, the city itself did not play a particular role, but later I realised that Vienna was actually a strategic location, from which I could easily travel to countries where tea culture was already well developed.

Lorela: Many people still associate Vienna with coffeehouse culture, yet the city has a surprisingly rich tea scene with tea houses offering very different experiences. What did you discover about Vienna’s tea culture that convinced you this was the right place to build something?

PierPaolo: Honestly, the main reason I'm building something here is that I live here. In the last 4 years alone, the number of tea shops that have opened has increased, partly due to the matcha boom, partly due to social media, and partly because more people are travelling to Asia and coming back curious. Vienna is a coffee city, but there's clearly an opening for tea here. What makes it especially interesting is that the new places opening aren't all doing the same thing. Each one has its own focus; some leaning into matcha and Japanese tea, others into Chinese gongfu, others into Taiwanese teas, others into a more casual format. That variety is what makes the Viennese scene worth paying attention to. It's not one style trying to dominate; it's parallel worlds.

Francesco: What convinced me that Vienna was the right place to build something was also the lack of an existing modern tea culture at the time. We need to go back almost ten years, when the tea scene in the city was basically non-existent, aside from a couple of old-school, traditional Western-style tea shops. 

I can proudly say that Vienna Tea Lovers played the role of a true trailblazer back then. We were not large enough to be highly influential, but for many people, it was one of the few opportunities to come into contact with a different tea culture and to share those moments. It was really only after the pandemic that the Vienna tea scene truly started to take off.

Lorela: This year you organise the third edition of the Vienna Tea Festival. What inspired you to create a festival rather than simply a tea business or tasting club? What gap were you trying to fill?

Francesco: I need to clarify that the idea for the festival was generated by multiple forces coming together. From our side, I felt that the tea scene in Vienna had grown enough that it deserved something bigger and more connected. Since we never had our own tea store, I still wanted to actively contribute to that growing scene and continue the trailblazing spirit that had guided us for years.

The inspiration came partly from tea festivals I had visited in Poland and the Czech Republic, which showed me how tea could become a cultural and social experience shared by very different people. At the same time, other people in Vienna were developing similar ideas, and eventually these visions came together. Honestly, on my own, I would never have been able to bring the Vienna Tea Festival to life, so the collaborative aspect was fundamental from the very beginning.

PierPaolo: Tea Lovers was always about bringing more people closer to tea. The festival is the same idea, just bigger. Vienna is in a good geographic spot for this. It sits between East and West, central Europe, which means we can pull in the Eastern European tea scene, which has amazing pottery tea shops, alongside the growing Austrian scene. The format is workshops for all levels and talks that actually go somewhere.

This year's theme was "one sip, a thousand stories", the idea being that every cup has people, places, and a business behind it, and we wanted to give space to those stories rather than just pour the tea and move on. We're still small, but the numbers are growing edition by edition. Last year's attendance made it clear the format is working. The gap we're filling is that there wasn't a single moment in Vienna where the whole scene, vendors, drinkers, producers, and the curious could be in the same place at the same time.

Lorela: Building a tea community sounds beautiful—but in reality, communities require constant energy, trust, and curation. What were the biggest hurdles in the beginning when you started bringing people together?

Francesco: In the beginning, everything felt like a series of jumps into the dark. I never really knew if people would show up, and at times I was already booking larger venues while simply hoping that the number of participants would continue to grow. What kept us going was seeing the genuine interest people had in these gatherings. Every successful meeting gave us the motivation and confidence to take the next step and push things a little further.

PierPaolo: Curating an event is more than just organising the evening itself. It means keeping an eye on what's happening in the tea scene, new shops opening, new producers, what people are talking about and turning that into new ideas for the meetups. Each event needs a reason to exist. Otherwise, it becomes the same thing on repeat, and people stop coming.

Lorela: Curating a community also means balancing very different audiences—from complete beginners to tea masters, vendors, and collectors. How do you make Tea Lovers Collective feel inclusive while still maintaining depth and authenticity?

Francesco: At the beginning, I was the one organising and leading most of the meetings myself. Later on, however, I wanted the project to become a learning platform for me as well, so I started inviting people I had met over the years to share their own knowledge and perspectives.

We never imposed strict rules on what the community should be, but one thing has always been important to us: keeping tea accessible. Tea may not be for everyone, but we strongly reject the idea that it should remain a secret reserved for a small elite. We are also not against commercial entities such as vendors or tea shops being involved in our events. At the same time, we believe that when they participate, the focus should remain on education, sharing, and popularisation rather than on promotion or sales.

PierPaolo: The thing that actually makes it work is that tea itself is the backbone. People sit down around it; brewing slows everyone down, and the chatting happens naturally or the tea “drunkenness”. Over time, that's created a community of people from very different backgrounds and cultures who probably wouldn't have crossed paths otherwise, different nationalities, different jobs, different reasons for being into tea, but they all end up at the same table.

We have the nerdy ones, the newcomers, the regulars, and the event just flows, brewing by brewing. Over the years, a core group has formed that comes every month and helps with the organisation, and there are always new faces alongside them.

Lorela: Looking back at your journey so far, were there moments where you questioned whether the community would work? What kept you going during the difficult phases?

Francesco: Like for many communities, the pandemic was definitely a critical moment for us. Gatherings were forbidden, so at one point we started meeting in the forest. It was actually fun and memorable, but obviously not something sustainable in the long term.

We also experimented with online meetings, but it quickly became clear that without real human interaction, the experience simply would not work in the same way. Tea is deeply connected to presence, sharing, and physical interaction.

A fundamental role during that difficult phase was played by Pier Paolo, who joined me later and gave me the support necessary to relaunch everything once the world slowly opened up again. His presence later became even more essential when I moved away from Austria, helping to continue what had initially been my meetup and eventually became our shared project.

PierPaolo: You organise something and 7 people show up, and you ask yourself what you're doing! It's worth saying that tea is a hobby for me, not a job ( for now ). I'm involved in different tea initiatives, the Vienna Tea Association board, and the festival. So the doubt is "can I keep doing this alongside everything else?" This year, specifically, was hard. Being fully invested in organising the Vienna Tea Festival while balancing work and family meant the regular Tea Lovers meetups became much harder to put together. Without the regulars stepping in to help, the Viennese events wouldn't have kept running.

Lorela: Through Tea Lovers Collective, you’ve connected with tea houses, producers, educators, and enthusiasts from different cultures. Has there been a particular tea origin or encounter that fundamentally changed your philosophy around tea?

Francesco: I think — or at least I expect — that Pier Paolo and I would probably give different answers to this question.

Personally, I appreciate all kinds of good tea, but I feel especially attracted to Chinese tea culture and style. For me, it connects beautifully with Taoist philosophy: an appreciation of balance, spontaneity, and imperfection. I love the idea that tea can be a celebration of imperfection and naturalness, rather than something overly codified or rigid.

This is also why I personally connect less with the more formal and demanding aspects often associated with the Japanese approach to tea, although I enjoy its taste and beauty.

PierPaolo: One moment was in San Francisco. I visited a Chinese tea house with a big tea table at the front. Customers would sit at the counter, the owner would brew and serve, and people would sip and talk to each other across the table. It creates a space where strangers end up in conversation. That sense of community is exactly what Tea Lovers ended up being. Japan also stayed with me, seeing the dedication and the work of the farmers around the tea plant, the level of care, the precision, and everything else in perspective.

Lorela: Europe’s speciality tea scene is evolving rapidly, but it still faces challenges around education, value perception, and accessibility. From your perspective, what are the biggest opportunities—and biggest obstacles—for tea culture in Europe today?

Francesco: I believe there is still enormous room for growth, mainly because the general level of knowledge about tea remains very limited. One of our missions has always been to let people discover what “real” tea can actually taste like. After that, of course, the choice is theirs.

Unfortunately, cafés and bars often do not help, since many still serve the cheapest tea bags while charging premium prices for them. But in many cases, the issue is not even intentional — they simply do not know any better themselves.

At the same time, we are seeing phenomena such as the explosive popularity of matcha. On one side, this can help attract attention to tea culture in general, which is positive. On the other hand, I am not always sure how much these trends truly contribute in the long term if they remain superficial or are driven mainly by hype.

What I believe is really important is giving people access to genuinely good tea experiences, because once people discover quality, they naturally begin to seek it out more consciously.

PierPaolo: There is a younger generation that already cares about provenance and craft because of speciality coffee and natural wine. Tea is the obvious next step. The challenge is making it accessible without dumbing it down, giving customers good quality and educating them at the same time, so they understand what they're drinking and why it's worth what it costs.

Lorela: Tea Lovers Collective has already grown from gatherings into festivals and cultural experiences. Looking ahead, what kind of legacy do you want to build? A movement, an educational platform, a European tea institution—or something else entirely?

Francesco: Well, the sky is the limit — although knowing Pier Paolo’s profession, maybe not even the sky would be a real limit for us.

Jokes aside, our personal lives have gradually taken us to different places, and this has also shaped our vision. The idea now is simply to continue spreading tea culture and the values behind it wherever life brings us.

Exactly how this will evolve in the future, I honestly cannot say yet. What I do know is that the principles we have spoken about — openness, education, sharing, and authenticity — will continue to guide whatever comes next.

PierPaolo: We are already expanding the collective beyond Vienna and across Europe (Francesco currently lives in Scotland). If the format we've built works in Vienna, there's no reason it can't work in other European cities and ideally connect them. The fact that it's all built by people doing it on the side, out of genuine interest, is part of the point.