London now has a Heytea lab, on Shaftesbury Avenue, with three UK exclusives on the menu

If you're a regular reader of Hot Dinners, you'll know that there's nothing that gets us more excited than the arrival of an interesting Asian bakery. And the newest addition to the scene sounds very much worth heading up to the West End to check out.

Heytea's new flagship store on Shaftesbury Avenue is a two-storey lab, and it's their fifth one outside China (they also have them in New York, Toronto and Bangkok). It's called a lab because they use it to play around with what can be done with tea and baked goods, and this one also features an ice cream parlour.

For the London launch, they've come up with three things that are going to be exclusive to the UK. That's a Rock Oolong caramel biscuit tea featuring Rock Oolong and milk with a caramel biscuit cloud, torched brown sugar and biscuit crumbs. There's a caramel biscuit croissant egg tart and also a caramel biscuit milk tea ice cream. Frankly, we don't know why we're writing about this when we should be grabbing our coat and heading into town to try it.

Even the design sounds gorgeous; it's apparently inspired by "the quiet simplicity shared by British country houses and Chinese tea gardens". We wish them luck channelling that on Shaftesbury Avenue. And if you want to bring some of that calm back to your own home, they're going to be selling merch like egg tart plates and jasmine tea incense sticks.