Boba Tea

My friend Kahlil broke me out of my work-home-sleep-wake-work rut with one simple text message asking me to come hang out with him at the What? Cafe. So I schlepped myself over there after work for a little break from the routine and the possibility of a good conversation.

And I got that, yay! And I also met a cool young lady by the name of Kelsey with the staff music for the Moonlight Sonata tattooed around her ankle (and an Asian symbol on the other foot whose meaning I cannot remember for the life of me!).

Before leaving, Kahlil offered me some tea. Now, being the automatic Google-r that I am, I had already done some research on where  What? Cafe was and what was on their menu. I found out that one of their featured items was boba tea (or bubble tea), which Wikipedia will tell you is “pearl milk tea and other similar tea and juice beverages that… contain small chewy balls made of tapioca starch, called “pearls” in Chinese.

Excuse me. My picky eater self retched at the thought of tapioca. I always envision it in my mind in tapioca pudding form which, to me, looks like fish eyes floating in white eye goop. Yum.

Against my picky eater’s better judgement, I decided “hey, let’s cross something off my 30 Before 30 list“ (namely, item 7).

I received a mini tea cup portion of taro tea with the boba balls in it.

As you can see, the straws are bigger than standard drinking straws, so you can get both the liquid and the balls at the same time. My first inhalation proved to be a fail because a  boba ball came rushing up with the tea and I freaked the freak out. But after that I was good.

What the boba ball looks like, even though my smartphone camera chose to focus on the tea.

So what do I think of the boba tea?

1) The taro tea was cold, wasn’t expecting that, but it tasted really good. Sorta of “herbal” but very sweet. Must have been the mixture of the milk and the taro (found out later that taro is sort of like a potato and very toxic if not cooked properly. Thanks Kahlil).

2) My description this morning of the boba tapioca ball was that it tasted sort of like a raisin and had the texture of a gummy bear. Not at all as bad as I was imagining.

In all, I didn’t hate it. I would love to try the taro tea again sans the boba balls. Mainly because I’m not quite over my weirdness about food textures and to me, randomly sucking up a gummy bear while drinking your tea is VERY distracting.

Ah well, 1 down, 19 to go!