Nothing quite captures the fizziness of two 13-year-olds on their way to fill their boots with bubble tea. Or boba tea, if you’re being authentic. Or just boba, if you’re being super authentic and cool about it, which, of course, these two are.
Sylvie, my daughter Joy’s mate, says she has dreamed of this day, as it’s been in the diary for a week or so, and I don’t doubt it. They’ve already made a list of what they want to try in a notebook and it reads like a novel. English teachers take note; if you require volume, set an assignment on boba tea and put your feet up.
On this alternative Christmas morning (that’s the level of excitement we’re talking about here) we’re off to Ohayo Tea on the Princess Street edge of Chinatown, which, when we visited a couple of Saturdays ago, had a queue snaking up around the corner towards the famous Chinatown arch, and no one in it was batting an eyelid about a 25 minute wait.
Indulge in more of Ben Arnold's food writing covering Greater Manchester...
The barber and bistro bringing the food of the West Bank to Stalybridge
The Rolls-Royce of pies and the warmest welcome at the UK's best pub, just an hour from Manchester
- The £45.50 all-you-can-eat menu with a slightly stressful time limit
This is the spot if boba is your thing. The north star. The centre of the universe.
These two are fixated. If they’re not drinking it, they’re talking about drinking it. If they’re not talking about drinking it, they’re watching other people either drinking it or making it on TikTok.
If they’re not watching other people drinking it or making it on TikTok, they’re squirrelling pocket money away to buy the gear to make it themselves from the Chinese supermarket.
For the uninitiated, firstly where in hell have you been? Secondly, boba tea is a Taiwanese invention, first concocted in the 80s, but which took hold in the US in the 90s, arriving here in the 2000s. It’s perhaps only in the past couple of years that it’s become truly omnipresent.
There are two kinds - fruit-based or milk-based, varying in sweetness, with the milk-based teas (made with all kinds of blends from black and green tea to earl grey and oolong) featuring a clump of chewy, flavoured tapioca pearls at the bottom (the ‘bubbles’).
The fruit ones also have guff in them too, except these bubbles usually pop instead, or are more jelly-like, a bit like having a fruit squash with Haribo floating in it. As a teenager, there’s quite literally nothing not to like here.
“It was really unfamiliar to me,” reckons Sylvie, on why she likes it so much. “It’s just a different kind of experience, having so many options and so many different textures and flavours. The aesthetic of the places, the packaging, the designs.”
I’m told to go and find FeedMeiMei on social media, a boba enthusiast from San Francisco with 1.6 million YouTube subscribers who posts frequent video recipes. I do, and just watching them makes my teeth hurt.
Arriving at Ohayo - their slogan is ‘Drink it! Don’t ask why!’, which seems a fair summation of the situation, considering - the orders from the resident experts fly in. The special Peach Star Lost - yellow at the top, green at the bottom and, as the name implies, featuring floating jelly stars - is bagged, along with a ‘Dirty Biscoff’, a matcha tapioca milk, an earl grey for me, as it sounds most like an actual brew, and a premium ‘brown sugar tapioca milk with cheese creme foam’, which sounds a bit of a curveball.
Some cute waffles in the shape of Shiba Inu dog heads and pumped full of Nutella go on the bill too, because apparently all this isn’t sweet enough already.
‘Sweetness level’ is specified for each milk-based boba, with the surprisingly reserved ‘regular’ coming in response. Everything arrives remarkably quickly, considering how complex it all sounds with the various teas, juices, bubbles and whatnot.
The Dirty Biscoff is an obvious winner. It has actual thick Biscoff goo at the bottom. Dentists of the UK should be deeply concerned. It gets a strong nine. It loses a point, astonishingly, by being ‘a little bit too sweet’, says Joy.
The Peach Star Lost splits the audience. Joy loves it, Sylvie finds it ‘artificial tasting’ and the boba aren’t the popping type, which disappoints. Joy doesn’t look like she wants to share it anyway. It gets a nine out of 10 from Joy, a lowly six from Sylvie.
The premium ‘cheese foam’ situation intrigues me. Don’t think cheese so much as the idea of cream cheese frosting. “It’s a contradiction,” says Joy. It is, and a delicious one at that. It’s a nine out of 10 from me, should my opinion matter among these aficionados, which it really doesn’t.
Sylvie likes the matcha. “It gets a seven,” she says. “I love the colour, the experience of drinking it, the health benefits. It just makes me feel a little bit better about myself.”
“I believe it tastes like grass,” says Joy. “Zero”. Harsh. My earl grey is ‘too sweet’ too, apparently. But I like it a lot. If you’re going in, you may as well treat it like a dessert.
This is my first time, so I’m in real novice territory. As the pearls fire up the tube, it’s all a bit too hectic. With each sip another ball flies up until you don’t know if you’re chewing or drinking anymore, and you feel like you’ve got your mouth wrapped around a bingo ball machine. But if you just lift the straw out a bit - the pearls sink to the bottom - you’ll find the onslaught slows and you stop panicking. I did.
OK, so none of this is remotely healthy. One of these could easily be half your calories for the day. But nonetheless, I get it all a bit more now. I’m not going to be queuing for half an hour, nor buying my own tapioca balls. But being a bewildered dad and reverting to ‘not understanding stuff’ type, even if it's just about bubble tea, is a bit lame. Best to dive in. The boba’s lovely.
Ohayo Tea, 95 Princess St, Manchester M1 4HT
Read more:
