Bursting the bubble

Anyone here ever had Bubble Tea? If you have not, let me offer this post to help you make up your mind. You can thank me later.

A while back a local salad shop in Canary Wharf quite close to my office closed its doors for the last time. What would replace it we wondered? The windows were boarded up or otherwise rendered opaque, and for several months nothing happened, or at least not visibly. Then one day I when I was passing I could could barely make it past such was the crowd. The demographic was strongly East Asian for a reason that I could not then discern, but having been to Singapore quite recently the answer is now clear. Bubble Tea. It might not be much of a 'thing' over here, or at least not to my knowledge, but in Asia people are wild for it and so the opening of a store in Canary Wharf with its international workforce was clearly highly anticipated. 

Earlier this week a colleague of mine suggested that our team went out for a Bubble Tea Experience. He had become hooked and wanted to show us what all the fuss was about. You only live once I suppose, I gave it a go. The menu is fixed, there are perhaps a dozen different drinks, all variations on a theme. Even this was too much for our small group of Bubble virgins to cope with, and whilst we dithered a large queue of the expected diaspora built up behind us, eager for their fix.

Here's what I had, the catchily-named Coconut Mango Boom. It cost £5.90, more than my lunch. This is broadly the same cost as beer, it had better be good. I picked up a straw the width of the Dartford Tunnel and took a preliminary slurp. Boom! This was the sound a marble-sized ball of firm gloop made as it hit the back of my throat and caused me to nearly choke to death on the spot. Now I understood why the straw was so immense. I was also beginning to understand why it is called Bubble Tea, something which I had never really given much thought to before. I spat the aforementioned bubble into the palm of my hand and examined it. Clear, vaguely spherical, dense and sticky with air. I gave it a tentative chew - firm, springy, a bit like a tasteless jelly bean. Tapioca, or cassava starch, something I'd not had in this format before. And now I know why. Exploring my drink a bit more it became clear that there were two sizes of this stuff in there. Big ones about the size of a small marble, and little ones like a tiny bead. The big ones I could detect and spit out (or spray out, as happened with a particularly large straw-full) but the little ones I ended up swallowing whole. My goodness what a vile drink this was. A vile concept in fact, completely lost on me. Why on earth is it so incredibly popular? The market is worth billions apparently, but once you have got rid of the pointless tapioca balls you are left with milk and fruit pulp, and of actual tea there was little sign. Anyway, my advice is to avoid this fad and have a proper cup of tea, or a milkshake, or a smoothie, but certainly not this bizarre combination of all three and laced with blobs. The only good use for it that I can think of is chucking it at Nigel Farage should you be unfortunate enough to happen across him. Probably not much of a market for Bubble Tea in Clacton....