Chai Tea

Chai Tea is a six-episode comedy mini-series for YouTube. Each episode will be approximately 10 to 12 minutes long. The series is set primarily inside Chai Tea Café, a proudly mismatched Indo-Canadian neighbourhood café in Surrey, BC, where Indian and Canadian culture meet through the food, decor, staff, and eccentric regular customers. When his uncle leaves for Punjab for a supposedly temporary retirement, struggling Indo-Canadian stand-up comic Maninder Cheema is forced to take over Chai Tea, a warm but chaotic café in Surrey. Maninder sees the customers as freeloaders, the staff as impossible, and the café as a trap. However, the more he complains about everyone around him, the more entertaining they find him. As Maninder attempts to impose order on the café, he begins to discover that he may be unexpectedly good at running the place he is desperate to escape. At its heart, Chai Tea is a bittersweet ensemble comedy about community, resentment, immigrant family obligations, and the fear of discovering that you may be good at the thing you most want to avoid. The series shoots September 4–11, 2026 in Surrey and Vancouver, BC.