[Constitutionalist Conservative]

Order an iced tea at a restaurant in the Deep South or Texas, and the frosty beverage set before you likely will be a world away from what you’d be served in New York or Chicago.

I don't know about the rest of the South, but in Texas if you order iced tea at a chain restaurant, you'll usually get unsweetened tea. This has been true for the 30 years I've lived here. In fact, I didn't even know about the Southern concept of sweet tea until about 10 years ago.

[Resolute Conservative]

The chains here in east Texas ( even McD’s ) make it sweet.

[carolinablonde]

My best friend when I was a teenager was from Waco, TX. In her family they made a kind of "tea syrup" by putting about 10 teabags in maybe 2 cups of water and letting it steep for a long time. Then, when they wanted a glass of tea, they just diluted the syrup with some more water. No sugar was added.

Must be a Texas thang.

They used to make fun of me for adding sugar to mine. :-)

[Paleo Conservative]

I don't know about the rest of the South, but in Texas if you order iced tea at a chain restaurant, you'll usually get unsweetened tea. This has been true for the 30 years I've lived here. In fact, I didn't even know about the Southern concept of sweet tea until about 10 years ago.

I stopped putting sugar in my tea back when I was a teenager in the seventies. Unfortunately about 2000 restaurants in South Texas started serving both unsweetened and sweetened tea. It may have been about the time the tea companies started supplying restaurtants with tea making machines and dispensers with their logos. Perhaps it's cheaper to make a big batch of sweetened tea than to put packets of sugar on each table and let each customer decide how much sugar to add. I find that presweetened tea has much more sugar than I ever used to put in. It's really complicated ordering tea, because sometimes waiters only hear "sweet" and not "unsweet". I not only can't stand to drink tea that sweet, but I also worry that the sweetener might be high fructose corn rather than sucrose from cane sugar.

[sam_paine]

I don't know about the rest of the South, but in Texas

You are correct, this article notwithstanding.

Sweet tea is from East of the Sabine. It did spill over into East Texas, but it is less common in Central Texas, and almost always is an option, unlike the deep south where if you ask for unsweetened tea they'll give you the dog-heard-a high-pitched-sound look.

[gcruse]

I’m inclined to agree. I was raised in the Texas panhandle and called Dallas home for years. Tea at restuarants was always served sugarless, and waiters never asked if you wanted sweet tea.

Here in Florida, they do, and it’s too sweet for me. I order unsweetened, then sweeten it.

As to lemon slices, I stopped for lunch at a Coco’s restuarant in Green River, California and had iced tea with my meal. I squeezed (squoze?) my lemon slice into the tea and drank.

The waiter saw me and said he’d never seen anyone squeeze the juice out of the lemon wedge before. I asked how he got the flavor into the tea otherwise. He said he just put in lots of wedges. LOL

[DustyWestTexas]

I was born and raised in West Texas and for much of my life we drank unsweetened tea. But when I was contracting in Central MS a few years ago I ordered unsweet tea...only to find that what they meant was “not as sweet” tea. hahahahaha. Drinking sweet tea in MS reminds me of Sunday dinner (lunch) at my grandmother’s house....man o man that was good.

[Ditter]

You are correct and I was going to point this out. In Texas presweetened tea is the exception (read that as never) not the rule. Just one of the ways Texans know we are not southern, neither are we western, we are Texas and that is a special place. We sweeten our tea (or not)!

[zeugma]

I don't know about the rest of the South, but in Texas if you order iced tea at a chain restaurant, you'll usually get unsweetened tea. This has been true for the 30 years I've lived here. In fact, I didn't even know about the Southern concept of sweet tea until about 10 years ago.

Most parts of Texas is barely Southern from a cultural point of view. It's more Southwest than South.