Last Friday, I took four nine-year-old girls to their favourite after-school hang-out, Tea Magic, a place that is distinct from, and in their view superior to, Shiny Tea, Gong Cha Tea, Coco Tea and Mochi Dulci. If you had to create in a laboratory an environment to appeal to tween girls it would be this one: on each wall, huge Hello Kitty-type murals and a menu involving combined fluorescent syrups and a range of brightly coloured add-ons loosely inspired by the tapioca “boba tea”. Within seven minutes, everyone was jacked up on sugar, including a group of girls from a rival elementary school, whereupon things briefly got exciting.
As someone who grew up in the era of Panda Cola, I’ll admit that fashion as expressed through the medium of soft drinks is something I occasionally struggle with. Fifteen years ago, I was kind of on board with iced coffee, which was a mistake. (First, the ice means you get less coffee, which means the Man wins again. Second, when the ice melts, you are effectively drinking coffee-flavoured water; wise up people, this isn’t desirable). More recently, when fruit-flavoured seltzer became a thing in New York – specifically, the brand La Croix – I wasn’t on board with that, either, mainly because I’m not 14 years old, and also because we buy our seltzer in 32-can off-brand crates from Costco that cost about half the price.
Now the new craze is bubble tea, enthusiasm for which eclipses all other recent soft-drink crazes, driven as it is by children and their ability to say the same thing over and over until they get what they want. It is expensive – in our neighbourhood, $7 (£5.50) for a large bubble tea, with a bunch of 75-cent tapioca and fruit boba add-ons – and it is filling. The experience of drinking strawberry-flavoured milk tea with a layer of sinewy, tapioca balls at the bottom is approximate, in my view, to enduring one of those 1940s wartime desserts people occasionally reintroduce for the lolz, or mistakenly draining a cup of leftover pearl couscous, with a shot of strawberry paediatric antibiotics on the side.
But the market disagrees with me. As the Guardian’s Hilary Osborne reported last week, bubble tea has gone gangbusters in the UK, with Costa Coffee introducing boba options alongside the rapidly expanding standalone tea chains. In the US, the bubble tea business is estimated to be worth almost $1bn, a figure expected to rocket in the next five years. Meanwhile, boba-in-a-can is popping up in the supermarkets, you can buy bubble-tea merch in New York’s Chelsea market and we must anticipate, 15 years from now, the inevitable bestselling book of Gen Alpha essays entitled Can You Choke on Bubble Tea and Other Thoughts On etc etc.
It’s not just the taste, obviously. The lure of visiting Tea Magic is partly about the glamour of the Taiwanese signage, the kitsch appeal of the decor and a sense of novelty more powerful than Starbucks, which is scrambling to catch up. In the US this spring, Starbucks introduced a boba option, which my children scorn, even as they clamour for the coffee chain’s strawberry acai lemonade or the caramel ribbon crunch (no caffeine). If Starbucks remains popular, the rise of bubble tea has coincided with a change in the coffee chain’s nature, as the old idea of the “third place”, furnished with sofas and armchairs, is replaced with standing tables and a drink-and-run vibe.
By contrast, you can linger in Tea Magic, where I sit at a different table to my children and their friends and pretend I don’t know them, an arrangement that suits everyone until things take a turn. One of our group, emboldened by a litre of sugar, rocks up to another table of girls and says, “The popping bubbles are really good,” which may sound innocent to you, but is apparently understood by fourth graders to be a piece of rapier-like sarcasm. Next thing you know people are out of their seats, giving what my children call bombastic side-eye, and shouting provocations such as, “We’re not tweens, you’re a tween,” whereupon I’m forced to drag my eyes from my phone and do some Parenting. This is where giving in to designer drinks gets you and, until next time, we will be in the park with some delicious bottles of tap water.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
