bubble tea quiero nada

i’m a bit of a Luddite where most pop culture trends are concerned. the clearest example would be the one where my dad owns a Blackberry, his friends have iPhones and i am content with my two year old Nokia. or where i hear about so-and-so who got together and broke up about six months after it happened. or where i happen to hear something on the radio that’s actually good (rarely happens) and ask about it, and discover that it’s been around for the past few months. it’s the same with food, which is why i haven’t had bubble tea till today. (“You’ve never had bubble tea? You must!” — R)

bubble tea was all the rage a few years ago. there were articles in newspapers and magazines about this trendy old-new drink that i never quite found the time or will to seek out, mainly because the notion of milk in tea is just wrong. milk obscures the delicate flavour of good tea, hides its characteristic bitterness and renders it bland. to my mind, milk tea is a cruel lie designed to deceive tea drinkers of the quality of their tea, though there will be and must be a chorus of cries to the contrary.

for illustrative purposes

to cure this bubble tea deficiency, The Second One* and A took me to Little Taiwan in One Utama. it’s a bright leaf green cafe with pretty lanterns and a very incongruous power point near the ceiling, which A pointed out. after ordering two glasses of the crappy and very misleading “Bubble Red Tea” which turned out to have been shaken to a froth (the bubble component, apparently) and contained no tapioca pearls, a glass of Green Pearl Milk Tea arrived (also another misnomer – the pearls were not green).

it was a very pretty drink, like the Taiwanese take on the local Michael Jackson, a layer of black tapioca pearls suspended in a creamy liquid in a big-bellied balloon glass. it is predominantly, peculiarly sweet and milky, with the barest hint of green tea in the background. it’s really tea-flavoured milk. (see, lies) the bubbles were the best part. not unlike miniature tang yuan, they’re chewy, faintly sweet and rather addictive. leave them long enough in the tea and they start to melt – lovely.

more bubbles and less tea would have been an improvement, and they should definitely be more specific with their menus. frothy tea is not bubble tea. i’ve concluded that you can make good bubble tea with crappy tea: the milk does a good job of disguising the deficiencies in their tea, which were sadly all too apparent in the Bubble Red Tea.

the staff were mostly Burmese, which meant that they had cute and exotic names (Kyaw Kyaw and San San) and didn’t speak much English. when i looked up from Carol Churchill’s Top Girls was two of the waitresses laughing, one resting her hand on the other girl’s breast. they noticed me looking and broke contact, and all three of us slightly abashed, resumed normality – i with my book and they with conversation. is this bodily camaraderie normal? i have no answers.

i still despise milk in my tea, though that doesn’t extend to tea-flavoured desserts or chai (which i have not tried). nor am i a bubble tea convert – maybe a small glass once in a long while. interestingly, not having milk in tea was also an indication of food snobbery, which probably says more about me than my rantings on milk tea.

*A has decided to christen my sister “The Second One”. i am, of course, “Third One”.