“Tea is an everyday, ordinary thing,” Elspeth Treadwell told me as she put homemade scones and pastries on a tray. “It shouldn’t be a fuss.” But she made a fuss over Erika, the photographer, and me on a warm June day, seating us at the sturdy wooden table that had recently been shipped from her childhood home in Minnesota. “It warms my heart when people sit here,” she told us, “because it reminds me of the days when my whole family used to sit and eat together.”
Elspeth, we soon learned, is incredibly devoted to her family. A former children’s book editor, she decided to open Podunk in 2002 with her husband, an academic, so they could spend more time with their daughter. Because they did not have much experience, Elspeth explained, they decided to call their tea room “Podunk,” meaning “a small, unimportant place in the backwoods.” That way, her husband said, “it wouldn’t be embarrassing if no one showed up.”
Customers did show up, however, and Podunk has been thriving ever since. Elspeth conquered the art of scone-baking, which had initially intimidated her, and sold her original tea flavors in packets decorated with her daughter’s artwork. Things have been more difficult in recent years, she admitted - her husband passed away in 2014, and their daughter is now in college - but she has continued to keep the family business running.
As we waited for our tea and scones, Erika, a member of the Manhattan Sideways team, and I got a chance to look around Podunk. We browsed through the children’s books on the shelves and admired Elspeth’s extensive collection of teapots. She told us later that she did not intend on collecting them: “People just can’t bear to throw teapots away,” she said, “so they give them to me.”
After setting our table with bright, checkered napkins, Elspeth brought us a tray laden with scones, cream, and two pots of tea. As we sipped our tea - I loved the aromatic “black orchid vanilla,” while Erika was partial to the spicy “sage apricot” - Elspeth told us that she had invented both flavors. “Sometimes emergencies turn into accidental discoveries,” she said with a smile.
Though we did not want to ruin Elspeth’s beautifully arranged tray - complete with fresh fruit and a sprig of mint - we could not wait to dig into the homemade scones. The consistency was perfect, and, topped with fresh cream and two flavors of jam, they were the perfect afternoon snack.
On our way out the door, we asked Elspeth about the piano against the wall, and she reminisced about the year she and her husband opened the tea room during the holidays for caroling. She told us that she did not have any regrets about giving up her job in publishing: in spite of the struggles of owning a small business, it seems that she has found her calling. “Everyone daydreams about those properties for rent in Manhattan,” she told us, “but we were the idiots who actually did it.”
