Then there's the Moby factor. The electronic musician and tea-loving vegan cofounded teany (pronounced teeny) four years ago. Moby, 40, has sold an estimated 15 million albums in his 23-year recording career and fans flocked to teany when it opened to catch the rare glimpse of a music star busing tables.
Now, however, Moby has stepped away, leaving the teahouse solely in the hands of Kelly Tisdale, 29, his former girlfriend and teany's cofounder. The result is both a new menu and a fresh outlook for Tisdale, a native of Templeton, Mass., a little town between Fitchburg and Orange.
''It's scary and it's great," Tisdale admitted. ''I feel so much more freedom. It used to be I'd do everything in my power to make it work, then I'd feel guilty because it didn't. Now that it's just mine, it's literally an agent for my own happiness."
Between humdrum, behind-the-scenes office work and crouching at customers' tables to check their satisfaction with the four-berry cheesecake, Tisdale is logging 80 hours of ''happiness" each week. A recent unusually warm winter morning found diners filling the 35 tables in the 500-square-foot main space inside teany and the slim patio edging the sidewalk at 90 Rivington St.
Tisdale estimates she worked as a waitress in a dozen restaurants after growing up in a partially macrobiotic household and heading off to college. She attended Suffolk University and waitressed at Charlie's Kitchen in Harvard Square. After graduating in 1999 with a degree in international affairs and government, then spending a year bartending, traveling, and pondering a move to London, Tisdale moved instead to New York, landing a communications job at Human Rights Watch, the worldwide human rights organization.
''I was toying with the idea of going back to school to get a human rights degree. Then the towers fell," she said of the life-altering events of Sept. 11, 2001.
Tisdale had met Moby two years earlier and the pair started living together in lower Manhattan. The terrorist attacks led to them to think about opening a business that might help bolster the spirit of their beleaguered community.
