I didn't start Tévo with a theory about nightlife. I started with the same situation happening to me again and again.
One night after dinner, three of us — childhood friends — wanted to keep hanging out. One didn't want to drink. The other didn't care either way. I suggested a bar. The friend who doesn't drink said no and went home. The other lost interest and left too. The night ended there. Not because anyone wanted it to, but because the next step required alcohol, and that was enough to split the group.
It kept happening. Nothing dramatic. Just the same small ending, over and over again. A night that could have continued didn't, because there was nowhere to go that carried the same energy as a bar without asking everyone to drink. Restaurants, cinemas, massage places, mahjong parlours — they all exist, but they are not the same thing. What was missing wasn't a non-alcoholic menu item. What was missing was a place.
When we opened our first Tévo Lounge in Guangzhou, I expected mostly younger people who, like me, sometimes just didn't feel like drinking. They showed up. But so did people I hadn't planned for. Many of our guests came from communities where drinking was never really an option in the first place.
Then there were guests in their forties and fifties. One of them told me, very plainly, that he used to drink but couldn't anymore: gout. He still wanted to sit somewhere good on a Friday night. He just couldn't go where that usually meant going.
What struck me was that these guests had nothing ideological in common. Some chose not to drink. Some never could. Some used to, and no longer could. But they all wanted the same basic thing: to go out at night, sit somewhere decent, hold something decent in their hand, and not drink alcohol. For a long time, that very ordinary desire had no serious answer.
I chose tea not out of reverence for tea culture, but because it works. Coffee belongs too strongly to the day. Even when it's decaf, it still carries the logic of cafés, work, and daytime routine. Juice moves too quickly in the other direction: it refreshes, but it doesn't carry enough weight, and it's hard to build a night around it.
Tea sits in a different place. It can be layered, textured, shaken, and built into something that looks fully at home on a bar counter. A night drink has to do four things: look right, feel right in your hand, reward slow drinking, and justify its price. Tea can do all four.
The proof isn't in how we describe it. It's in a moment that happens almost every night. Someone sees one of our Tap-Tap series drinks for the first time — dark, foamy, served in a glass that looks like a stout — and says, "Wait, isn't that a beer?" It isn't. But the fact that they can't tell at first glance is exactly the point. We didn't set out to imitate alcohol. We set out to build something with the same visual and sensory weight, so the person holding it never feels like they're holding a compromise.
People sometimes ask if we're just a tea shop with better furniture. I understand the comparison if all you see is the word tea. But a tea shop usually serves the day: quick decisions, quick purchases, something to take with you. Tévo is built for a different moment. People come after nine. They stay for hours. They're not buying something to carry out. They're buying a reason to sit down and stay.
When someone says they go to a bar for the drink itself, I have no argument with that. Tévo is not trying to take anyone out of a bar. But when someone doesn't want to drink and their only real alternative is going home, that isn't a preference. It's a gap. And the night should have more than one way in.