Peter C.
Yelp
TLDR: Very fresh drinks due to teas being made via espresso machine, genmaicha is my absolute favorite, boba can use some improvement, and still more items to be pushed out!
A brand new challenger has arrived at the DMV area for bubble tea! I am always a sucker for pun-ny store names and this one's no exception. My friend has told me there's a grand opening deal for this place for 50% off the first week after it opened so I decided to check it out (I mean, I still would have without it but this is just adds the boba to the tea!). After I arrived I can see that this place is one of the rarer breed of bubble tea shop that opt for making the tea using the low pressure espresso machine style vs. the much more widely-used hot brewed, chilled, then dispensed method. This gives the store the advantage of:
1.) Ability to mix the different tea leaves to create a combo flavor
2.) The tea is much fresher throughout the whole day operation of the store as it is brewed to order
The disadvantage however, would be the speed at which the tea can be made, as each drink needs to have the tea dripped from the espresso machine, add the ingredient in, stir to mix while its still hot, put the drink into the blender machine to pulse for a quick quarter of second to chill it enough so it doesn't warp the plastic cup, then put it in the cup with the topping and ice. However, with proper training, the speed of which they can push out the tea should still be between 2-4 minutes on average!
Now enough of the technical mumbo jumbo, so how about the actual tea themselves? They have a wide variety of tea flavors to try, and as of this review, I have tried the following: Genmaicha, Early Grey, Roasted Oolong, and Assam. And here's how I would rank them from best to good:
1. Genmaicha
2. Roasted Oolong
3. Early Grey
4. Assam
Genmaicha is by far my favorite, and I can't exactly describe its flavor, but one of my friend said it tasted kind of akin to soy milk, so maybe that's why I liked it so much as I drank soy milk growing up in Taiwan.
In terms of the customer service, there is definitely more training needed to make the cashier more comfortable answering question without the help of whom seem to be the shift leader or manager there; when I asked about what the flan milk tea is, the cashier that day was drawing a blank and had to have someone else answer the question. But since they're new there's nothing wrong with that! It takes time to get acquainted with the product itself as a staff.
The only two toppings I have gotten so far were the regular honey boba and the crystal boba. I strongly believe that all stores should have crystal boba now as it is my new favorite topping even above the regular boba, and their regular boba could still use some work as it sometimes was hard and not as chewy as I would prefer.
Overall I really enjoyed the experience, and will definitely be back here to try more tea, as well as some of the snacks they have to offer (I have tried the lemon grass fries and it was really good, and I saw just now they are having taro waffle for samples so it's nice to see they're continuing to innovate instead of settle with what they have!)
Oh and they also have cute bottles to put the drinks in instead of the regular plastic bottles, I use it as my water bottle now :D
Keep up the good work!
