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, and what it actually is.
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 and worth understanding. Ceremonial grade is the highest quality, used in traditional tea ceremony preparation — 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 of bitterness and underlying sweetness is what makes matcha so useful as an ingredient. In a matcha latte, the natural sweetness of oat milk or similar bases softens the bitterness and creates a drink that's complex without being harsh. In a smoothie, the earthiness anchors fruit-forward flavours that might otherwise be one-dimensional. In a chia pudding, it adds depth that plain chia pudding lacks.
The common mistake with matcha in food and drink 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. A matcha preparation that's so sweet the matcha becomes invisible is a wasted ingredient.
The Matcha Items at Ten Trips
The menu at Ten Trips includes matcha across several categories, which reflects how broadly useful the ingredient is when it's being used thoughtfully rather than as a garnish.
The Blueberry Matcha Latte and Blueberry Matcha Smoothie are among the newer additions to the 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 rather than either dominating. This is a combination that's become popular in specialty cafés internationally, and for good reason: it works at a flavour level in a way that feels considered rather than arbitrary.
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 works differently because chia pudding has its own gentle, neutral flavour that matcha can define entirely. It becomes the primary flavour carrier rather than a counterpoint, which changes how much it needs to be present and how it reads to the person eating it.
Across all of these, the question being asked in the kitchen is the same: is the matcha doing something necessary here, or is it decorative? If the preparation works without it, it shouldn't be in it.
What L-Theanine Does (Without Overclaiming)
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 to manage. The combination appears to moderate how caffeine is absorbed and processed, producing a different quality of alertness.
Matcha also contains antioxidants, including EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate), which is well-documented in tea research. We're not going to claim specific health outcomes from drinking a matcha smoothie — that's not how nutrition works, and overselling ingredients is something we actively try to avoid. But the underlying quality of the ingredient, when sourced and prepared properly, is genuinely good. That's part of why it's in the menu rather than another trending powder that'll be gone in eighteen months.
Why It's Not 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 real and somewhat circular — 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? Is it being used at a quality level that justifies its presence?
Matcha passes that test every time. Which is why it's in everything.