Text by Lorna Reeves • Photography Courtesy of Kelly Hackman
Falling in Love with Afternoon Tea in The Sunshine State
Kelly Hackman is the first to admit that her journey into tea was somewhat unexpected. The native Floridian’s earliest recollections about tea weren’t of tea parties with pretty china and dainty foods but rather of her mother putting teabags in a big jug and setting it outside to make sun tea. “If you had to me 7 or 8 years ago that I would be doing this,” says Kelly, owner of The White Heron Tea & Gifts since 2016, “I would have denied you up and down, because tea wasn’t anything I thought of as an option in my life because it wasn’t prominent growing up.”
Born and raised just north of Tampa in New Port Richey, Florida, a town of approximately 16,000, Kelly worked for several years for an agency that raised money for non-profit organizations. She loved the impact she was making, but she found the work exhausting and stressful. She decided that if she was going to work that hard, she wanted to do it for herself and to help her town. “I said to my husband, ‘I think our town has potential, and I want people to love it like I love it,’ ” Kelly recalls. “New Port Richey is so picturesque. The buildings are beautiful. I just see it like that town you would see in a Hallmark movie.” And because the towns featured in those movies all seemed to have a gift shop, Kelly decided that she would like to open one. Her CPA and her attorney, concerned about the long-term viability of such a retail venture, advised her to put something else with the gift shop—perhaps a bakery or a coffee shop, they suggested. But none of those options resonated with Kelly, so she put the entire idea on the shelf until one fateful day in 2015.
“My husband, Bryan, works for an engineering firm near Tampa, and he was driving to MacDill Air Force Base to do a survey for his company and passed by this little tea shop and gift shop together,” Kelly relates. “He called me up and said, ‘I have the perfect idea! We need to do a tearoom with a gift shop because that will draw people into downtown.’ ” A few days later, the couple stopped by The Royal Tea Room & Gift Shoppe, the business that had sparked the idea, to see if the concept might work for them in New Port Richey. Because advance reservations were required for dining in the tearoom, Kelly and Bryan were only able to visit the gift shop, but a few days later, she and her mom, Debbie Zisa, returned for afternoon tea. “That was the first time I had had tea in a tearoom with the tea sandwiches and every- thing,” Kelly explains. “My mom and I spend a lot of time together, but we never had sat down and spent an hour like that just visiting. It was so nice and so relaxing that I started to convince myself that I wanted a tearoom instead of a gift shop.”
A few weeks later, Kelly made reservations for two friends to join her and Debbie for afternoon tea at The Royal Tea Room. Kelly laughs as she remembers telling her friends how their teatime was going to work, “You’re going to eat the food they give you. You’re not picking and choosing. You’re going to drink the tea and stay off your phone.” She thought one of the women, who was always very busy and normally on her phone a lot, was “going to have heart failure.” A few days later, though, that same friend told Kelly how much she had enjoyed that hour of serenity and that she was looking forward to repeating the relaxing experience again soon.
“So for me, it became about the time versus the beverage. It became about creating an environment where people could get together and have that calmness and be out of the everyday hustle and bustle even if just for an hour,” explains Kelly, who has since become a Certified Tea Specialist and Tea Sommelier through World Tea Academy. “If I could give somebody that, that became my goal. And that’s how I ended up making the decision to do tea versus the focus of a gift shop.”
