Atlanta Magazine • Atlanta Magazine February 2026 • Things We Like

Atlanta’s traditional Chinese teahouse isn’t flashy on the outside, but inside, it offers an experience found nowhere else in town

Unassumingly wedged between a bike shop, an auto repair shop, and the train tracks on the upper Westside is Atlanta’s only traditional Chinese-style teahouse. Its owners, Wayne Belonoha and Amy Zhang, do not place ads or promote it with any regularity on social media.

“If you’re into tea, eventually you will find us,” Belonoha says. “We’ve got something good here. Something from the heart.”

The shop is called Wai’s Gong Fu Tea House. Wai is Belonoha’s adopted name as a certified kung fu master, and gong fu (which roughly means “mastery”) is the Chinese style of tea service in which whole tea leaves are steeped several times, each time brewing only a few ounces of tea for each guest. Over the course of a gong fu session, a guest is likely to drink several dozen cups this size. It would be unthinkable to add milk or sugar; gong fu is a completely different experience from the English style of tea service that is more familiar in the West.

“All of the teas done gong fu–style have body and depth, but they’re also delicate,” Belonoha says. “So you can keep drinking this tea all day, and it won’t overpower your body.”

Belonoha and Zhang are reluctant to brew a cup of tea to go. Instead, customers can make a reservation or walk in for an hour-long session. Since this experience is all about tea in its purest form, no food is served. During the session, guests are seated at either a 1,000-lb. solid jade table or a one-and- a-half-ton camphorwood table. Each is ornate, with one-of-a-kind carvings and water features, such as a stream flowing continuously downward across the tabletop. Gentle, traditional Chinese music plays in the background to accompany the sound of the flowing water. Belonoha and Zhang serve three teas—usually one green, one oolong, and one black—to present a spectrum of flavors. Guests learn how the flavors change as the leaves continue opening up with each steep.

Take, for example, Jin Jun Mei (golden eyebrow), a black tea from the Wuyi Mountains. The first few steeps are malty, with an umami flavor reminiscent of soy sauce.

“But after a while, that drops off, and you get some really nice sweetness, and the citrusy notes start to come out,” Belonoha says. “That’s the roller coaster ride.”

Some of the green teas available at Wai’s are from Huangshan (Yellow Mountain), a region in eastern China where Zhang grew up. It’s a place where whole leaf tea was integral in daily life. She later met Belonoha through kung fu. Zhang, too, is a certified kung fu master. They both say that tea and kung fu are closely linked because they are practices that help improve focus.

“Tea is meditation. Kung fu is meditation— it’s like self-care,” Zhang says. “I feel each movement of energy inside, and I focus on each feeling.”

Starting at 6 p.m. every Monday, Wai’s holds a “communi-tea” tasting event that is free to the public and does not require a reservation. Each round can accommodate eight guests, and Zhang and Belonoha typically host multiple rounds in a night. Guests can sip several steeps of one featured tea. Many community members return week after week, writing down their tasting notes in a notebook to remember each tea they have tried from among the nearly 50 teas in Wai’s collection and walking out with leaves of their favorites to brew at home.

“What we want to do is not just expose people to great, healthy tea,” Belonoha says, “but also open the door to get them to be able to enjoy it for themselves.”