A Fort Worth artist who spent years riding motorcycles and backpacking across Southeast Asia in search of exceptional tea has turned that pursuit into the city's first late-night tea house and lounge. Floating Lotus Tea officially launched in mid-July inside Hao's Grocery & Café at 120 St. Louis Ave., Ste. 103, offering a cozy, speakeasy-style spot with just 20 seats, live DJ sets every night, and teas sourced directly from farms its founder visited herself.
The lounge is the creation of Choke, a Fort Worth artist and certified tea sommelier whose name is an acronym for creating her own kinetic energy, according to CultureMap Fort Worth. Over roughly the past 15 years, Choke traveled across China, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Taiwan and Myanmar, working alongside tea farmers to cultivate, harvest and process leaves and forming friendships along the way. She hand-crafted much of the tea house's interior herself, sourcing and reclaiming wood for the tables and chairs, sewing custom pillows and drapes, and decorating the room with her own paintings and sculptures.
Choke has said she wants to preserve and support the tea farming communities she came to know overseas, and that she hoped to build a Fort Worth space for deeper conversations than a typical bar or coffee shop allows. That mission shapes the programming: Floating Lotus hosts Communitea Nights that encourage guests to taste different teas while talking with fellow visitors, alongside philosophy discussions, educational tasting classes, guided tea meditations, and tea-themed movie nights. Icebreaker prompt cards are on hand for anyone who needs a nudge to start talking to a stranger over a pot of oolong.
A Thursday Night Collaboration Grows Into a Full-Time Lounge
Floating Lotus didn't start as its own storefront. Choke and Vietnamese vegan chef Luu Lac initially used the back space of the lounge on Thursday nights, serving tea and food alongside live DJ sets, and that partnership continues even now that the concept has expanded into nightly hours. The lounge is currently open Wednesday through Saturday from 6 pm to 1 am, per CultureMap Fort Worth's report on the opening.
The venue sits inside Hao's Grocery & Café, a gourmet market and bistro offering international items and to-go meals that has become something of an anchor for Asian food culture in the neighborhood. The market's summer 2026 evolution also brought in a plant-based food partnership with local vendor It's Food, which supplies late-night vegan dishes like kimchi poutine and bánh mì to pair with the tea service, according to The Fort Worth Guide. Beyond the commercial offerings, the market also runs a weekly Saturday morning free grocery box giveaway in partnership with Meals with Meaning, giving the address at 120 St. Louis Ave. a dual identity as both a nightlife destination and a neighborhood support hub.
Hao Tran's Culinary Footprint Keeps Expanding
Hao's Grocery & Café is operated by Fort Worth chef Hao Tran, who first took over the St. Louis Avenue lease in early 2023, rebranding a space that had previously housed The Table culinary studio and local market, as 360 West Magazine reported at the time. Before her culinary career took off, Tran worked as a Fort Worth ISD math teacher, building a local following through dumpling pop-ups that eventually served more than one million dumplings, per craveDFW.
That success is now fueling a bigger leap: Tran is opening her first full-service restaurant, a 4,000-square-foot Vietnamese concept called Duong DeVille with 124 indoor seats and 34 patio seats inside Entrepreneur Park in White Settlement this summer, craveDFW's report notes. How that expansion will affect day-to-day operations back at the original Near Southside market remains an open question for now.
Part of a Bigger Wave Along St. Louis and Magnolia
Floating Lotus isn't the only new arrival transforming this stretch of Near Southside. Rose Group Realty has tracked a concentrated surge of hospitality openings in summer 2026, counting six new venues — including Hiro's Kitchen omakase, At The Oaks Coffee House and Salt & Straw — within a walkable four-block rectangle bounded by West Magnolia Avenue and South Main Street. Hoodline previously covered the tiny sushi counter among that group, part of what local real estate reports describe as the district's shift from a dinner-only destination into an all-day and late-night lifestyle corridor.
Tea culture isn't entirely new to the neighborhood, either. Floating Lotus follows earlier venues like Leaves Book and Tea Shop on West Magnolia, which once hosted joint tea-and-dumpling pairing events with Tran, according to a 2023 post on Hao's Grocery & Café's Facebook page. The district's transformation is also playing out in Asian dining more broadly; Hoodline has reported on Teddy Wong's, whose original Near Southside location helped cement the area's reputation as a hub for Asian concepts, even as it expanded to Weatherford.
That density of jobs and foot traffic isn't accidental. Near Southside encompasses Tarrant County's second-largest employment center, with roughly 40,000 jobs anchored by six major medical centers that form North Texas's largest concentration of healthcare workers, according to Near Southside Inc. Fort Worth's own mixed-use zoning rules, adopted in 2008 to replace outdated single-use industrial zoning, helped pave the way for the kind of walkable, small-footprint concepts that Floating Lotus represents. The demographic backdrop matters too: Fort Worth is home to nearly 10,000 Vietnamese residents, ranking fifth among all Texas municipalities for Vietnamese population size, per CultureMap Fort Worth reporting cited on Reddit's r/FortWorth forum.
For now, Choke says she just wants people to walk in with an open mind about tea itself — treating it less like a commodity and more like an invitation to slow down and talk. With nightly DJ sets, meditation sessions and a standing Thursday collaboration with Luu Lac, Floating Lotus is betting that Fort Worth has room for a late-night hangout that doesn't revolve around alcohol at all.
