Matcha has had a complicated few years.
It went from a traditional Japanese tea ceremony ingredient to a Starbucks seasonal flavour to a near-universal café menu fixture, and somewhere along the way the word lost some of its meaning. Today you can find "matcha" in everything from lattes to ice cream to lip balm, and the quality range across those products is genuinely enormous — from ceremonial-grade powder with real depth and complexity to a green-coloured sugar blend that shares a name and very little else.
At Ten Trips, matcha appears across multiple items on the menu. That wasn't a decision made because matcha is trending. It was made because when matcha is the right ingredient in the right preparation, it does something that very few other ingredients can — it adds bitterness, earthiness, and a particular kind of depth that makes both sweet and savoury preparations more interesting than they'd otherwise be.
This is the case for why we use it, what it actually is, and what we're building next.
What Matcha Actually Is
Matcha is finely ground powder made from shade-grown green tea leaves. The shading process — typically three to four weeks before harvest — forces the plant to produce more chlorophyll, which is what gives matcha its distinctive deep green colour. It also increases the concentration of L-theanine, an amino acid that occurs naturally in tea and contributes to the calm-but-alert feeling that regular matcha drinkers often describe.
Unlike steeped green tea, where you brew the leaves and discard them, matcha involves consuming the entire leaf in powdered form. This means that whatever the tea plant contains — its antioxidants, its amino acids, its natural compounds — you're consuming a concentrated version rather than a diluted extract.
The quality difference between grades of matcha is significant. Ceremonial grade is the highest quality — bright green, with a smooth, slightly sweet flavour and minimal bitterness when prepared correctly. Culinary grade is the broader category used in cooking and most café applications, with a more robust and slightly more bitter flavour profile that holds up well when mixed with other ingredients like milk, banana, or smoothie bases.
What doesn't qualify: products that use matcha flavouring rather than actual matcha powder, blends that are mostly sugar with a small percentage of tea powder, and anything that's brown or yellow-green rather than the vibrant green of quality matcha.
Why the Taste Works
Matcha's flavour profile is unusual because it occupies several registers simultaneously.
There's the bitterness — the characteristic umami-forward, slightly vegetal quality that distinguishes it from other green teas. There's the earthiness, which is what makes it work well with other strong flavours rather than getting lost. And there's a natural sweetness underneath, particularly in higher-quality grades, that emerges when the bitterness is balanced correctly.
This combination is what makes matcha so useful as an ingredient. In a latte, the natural sweetness of oat milk or similar bases softens the bitterness and creates a drink that's complex without being harsh. Paired with fruit, the earthiness anchors flavours that might otherwise be one-dimensional.
The common mistake with matcha is treating the bitterness as a problem to be overcome with sugar. Properly used, that bitterness is the point — it's what makes matcha interesting rather than simply green-flavoured.
What L-Theanine Does
One of the genuinely interesting things about matcha is the L-theanine content and its interaction with caffeine.
L-theanine is an amino acid found almost exclusively in tea plants. It has a mild calming effect and is associated with what's sometimes described as a "focused relaxation" — alert without the edge that caffeine alone can create. In matcha, where both caffeine and L-theanine are present in the whole leaf, many people find the experience different from coffee: a sustained, clear-headed energy without the spike and subsequent crash.
This is worth mentioning not as a health claim but as a practical observation about why matcha has become a preferred alternative to coffee for a lot of people who find caffeine sensitivity difficult. The combination appears to moderate how caffeine is absorbed and processed, producing a different quality of alertness.
The Matcha Drinks at Ten Trips — Current Menu
The Blueberry Matcha Latte and Blueberry Matcha Smoothie are among the standout matcha preparations on the current menu. The pairing of blueberry and matcha is deliberate — the tartness and fruitiness of blueberry plays directly against the earthy bitterness of matcha in a way that makes both flavours more pronounced. This is a combination that's become popular in specialty cafés internationally for good reason: it works.
The Mango Matcha Smoothie and Mango Matcha Latte from the Summer Special menu apply the same principle with mango. Mango's natural sweetness and fragrance provide one register; matcha's earthiness provides the counterpoint. The result is a drink that feels like it has structure rather than just sweetness.
The Mango Matcha Chia Pudding extends the combination into a different format — here the matcha becomes the primary flavour carrier, defining the entire preparation rather than playing counterpoint.
What's Coming: The New Matcha Menu
This is where it gets interesting.
Ten Trips is expanding the matcha offering significantly. Four new preparations are launching soon, each built around a different flavour pairing and a different idea of what matcha can do.
Coconut Cloud Matcha
The idea here is contrast — matcha's earthiness against the sweetness and richness of coconut. The "cloud" in the name refers to the texture: a lighter, aerated preparation that sits differently from a standard latte. Coconut and matcha is a pairing that's well-established in Southeast Asian food traditions and has found a new audience globally through specialty cafés. This version is Ten Trips' take on it, built for the Mumbai palate.
Blueberry Matcha
An evolution of the existing blueberry matcha preparations on the menu, this is a dedicated drink built around the pairing that's already proven popular at Ten Trips. If you've tried the current Blueberry Matcha Latte and want more of that — this is the next step.
Strawberry Matcha
Strawberry and matcha is a combination that sounds unlikely until you try it. Strawberry's bright, slightly floral acidity creates a very different counterpoint to matcha than blueberry does — lighter, more summery, with less tannin and more fragrance. The result is a drink that's visually striking (the pink-and-green contrast is hard to ignore) and genuinely interesting to drink. This will be one of the more distinctive items on the new menu.
Dirty Matcha
For the coffee drinkers who've been curious about matcha but aren't ready to leave espresso behind: dirty matcha is the answer. A shot of espresso added to a matcha base creates something that has the depth and caffeine kick of coffee alongside the earthiness and L-theanine of matcha — two alert-promoting compounds in one drink, balanced rather than competing. It's become a staple at specialty cafés internationally and it belongs on a menu that takes both coffee and matcha seriously.
Why Matcha Isn't Going Anywhere
Some ingredients become permanent fixtures in good food because they actually work — as flavours, as nutritional contributors, as things that make what surrounds them better. Matcha is in that category.
It predates the wellness trend by centuries. Japanese tea ceremony culture has been using powdered green tea since the 12th century. The current global fascination with matcha is partly driven by genuine merit, partly by aesthetics (the colour photographs extremely well), and partly by the way food trends move through social media. But the ingredient itself is the same regardless of what surrounds it commercially.
At Ten Trips, the test for any ingredient is consistent: does it make the preparation better? Does it add something that wouldn't be there otherwise?
Matcha passes that test every time. Which is why it's in everything — and why there's more coming.