The teapot from hell? Why the Chinese restaurant staple needs a rethink – the traditional design is cheap, leaky and dangerous to handle, so why are we still using it?
- The same classic Chinese teapot shape is found in dim sum restaurants from Hong Kong to New York, but its poor, cheap design means it’s far from fit for purpose
- The spout is too short and leaks everywhere, the belly is too wide and burns the palm, the handle crushes the fingers and the lid falls off all the time ...
The painful memory of my first run-in with this teapot still burns. When I was about 10 years old, my parents taught me the courtesy of pouring tea for everyone else at the table before mine. On that fateful Saturday, during yum cha, they asked me to pick up the teapot and pour tea for my grandma.
The experience was comical yet traumatic. I remember that the teapot, filled to the brim with boiling water, was too heavy for me to pick up by the handle with one hand. The unbalanced weight of the pot caused it to tilt forward, mashing its scalding belly against my fingers.
But before I even had time to react, hot tea was spurting from the spout and spilling all over the table. By this point, my hand was cramping as well as suffering from first degree burns. I lost grip of the pot, the lid fell off and scalding water splashed everywhere but into my grandmother’s cup!
Cacophony ensued, with my parents telling me off, my grandmother questioning their intelligence in getting a little girl to handle boiling water, and me crying in despair, wondering what I had done to deserve this cruel and unusual punishment.
Decades later, I had largely forgotten this incident, until I was at a dim sum lunch with my son. The sight of him next to the teapot brought back memories of that scalding experience and I couldn’t help but wonder – why are we still using it?
This teapot ticks all the boxes but the only thing it does not do is pour a decent cup of tea
But first, is the teapot really that bad?
“Yeah, it leaks and it’s purely just a bad spout design. The tip of the spout is too fat, and the angle is wrong,” says Kenny Son Yong-soo, a Sydney-based object designer, whose creations include a famous line of teapots.
“But it’s impossible to craft a thin spout with the cheap material they use,” Son adds.
The handle is too flat, making it almost impossible to hold, and the recessed lid keeps falling off because of how far one must tip the wide teapot to get all the tea out.
“Ergonomics have not been thought out at all in making that teapot,” he concludes.