Victoria K.
Yelp
[NYC BOBA TOUR STOP #33]
*My other stops on the boba tour: https://www.yelp.com/collection/4dXTAnFqPHD1D8obaInTZw/nyc-boba-tour
Guys, this is our GO TO Coco. We have been here many many times- we probably carried this business on our backs during COVID after coming here so often. But our most recent experience here was absolutely not it.
To start... the drinks. We got (rating): Classic Milk Tea with QQ (4/5), Classic Milk Tea with QQ (4/5), QQ Black Tea Latte (2/5), Tropical Special with Grass Jelly (3/5), Jasmine Milk Tea with QQ (3/5), Cloud Green Tea with Grass Jelly (3.5/5)
Nothing really stood out, not even the QQ balls, which are the reason we go to coco. These QQ boba balls are usually ELITE. Like, the perfect bouncy texture with the taro/sweet potato taste to go with it. They are the best. I don't remember the last time I ordered boba here- they are THAT good. And usually they're consistently that good, but this time they just weren't up to par. Though they had the signature bounce, they didn't taste like anything.
The real story here is in the service.
Coco has an app now! Great! I love rewards and I love ordering ahead. The thing is, if I order ahead, which we did in this case, I would expect my drinks to be done or at least in the process of being done when I get to the store. The workers at coco themselves even advised my uncle the last time he was there to "get the app so he could order ahead!" Great, amazing, my uncle did just that. Except for the fact that we ordered ahead, arrived 10 minutes later, and when we gave them our name they said, "Oh, we'll start making your drinks now."
WHAT.
Y'all those drinks should be DONE, or at least in the process of being done, by now. Our credit card was already on file, they had already charged us, so they shouldn't have been afraid of making the drinks and no one picking them up. It's really simple: if they have an order ahead option, they should make the orders ahead of time. Instead we were left waiting an additional 15 minutes after we'd arrived for our drinks.
Then, our QQ Black Tea Latte originally did not have QQ balls in it. No worries, we caught the mistake and asked them to add it when we noticed. The problem with that was that they put the drink into a new cup that did not have the label on it and unfortunately the black tea latte looked exactly like the classic milk teas. This... wouldn't have been an issue if the black tea latte was the only drink that was unlabeled.
Not only was one of the classic MTs unlabeled, but the missing label was actually put on the jasmine milk tea so that the jasmine milk tea's label said "classic milk tea." The only reason why I knew was because I order the jasmine milk tea so often that I know what it looks like. None of the drinks had the jasmine milk tea label.
So... if you're visualizing it all in your head correctly, you'll realize that we were left with two drinks unlabeled: one classic milk tea and one black tea latte, both looking exactly the same. To rectify this issue, I ran both drinks to my cousin who proceeded to stab her straw into each drink, taking a sip of both in order to figure out which one was hers. She ended up choosing the one she thought was hers (who's to say if she was right), and that was that.
It was genuinely just so much unnecessary headache. As I've mentioned, this is the first time this coco has been like this, so we'll definitely be back. It's an experience we won't forget though.