A rare post about boba
Today I went to try Molly Tea, another boba shop that's recently opened up in the Bay Area. I had a ton of thoughts™️ about the drink, so much so that I realized I had an mini existential crisis about boba and needed to write a blog post about it?
Today I went to try Molly Tea, another boba shop that's recently opened up in the Bay Area. I had a ton of thoughts™️ about the drink, so much so that I realized I wanted to write a blog post about it? Which... never happens.
My thoughts were pretty meandering, so I've organized them into a few sections to make things a little more coherent (though in reality I was thinking about all of these things in parallel and jumping between them as I was having a minor existential meltdown of sorts).
Molly Tea Review
Originating from China and first in the US in NYC, Molly Tea opened up in Sunnyvale this past October to a decent amount of buzz on social media. They specialize in jasmine milk tea drinks (more on this later), and even their website specifies, "Molly Tea is dedicated to the ultimate exploration of all things Jasmine." With a pretty limited menu — it's mostly variants of jasmine milk tea, with modifications including jasmine cream on top or oat milk in place of fresh milk — it's clear they focus on making one type of drink well, as opposed to boba shops that try their hand at having a large selection (some with dozens and dozens of different options).
I got the Premium Jasmine Milk Tea (茉莉奶白), with the recommended settings of less ice and less sugar. One thing that might be interesting or outright surprising to boba drinkers here is that Molly Tea doesn't actually have boba! Yes, you read that right — while they do list "White Boba" on their menu, it's... just about always unavailable, and it's not the black-colored pearls that we come to expect at boba shops. They do offer pecan as a topping (???), which is really atypical, and I wasn't adventurous enough to try it. I did, however, add the only other topping option on the menu, which was sago, which... honestly I felt detracted / distracted from the drink itself.
Like just about every other review of the store online, the first and most prominent thing you'll notice about the drink is the really forward floral fragrance. Like, in terms of tea flavor (and even general aroma) of the drink, the jasmine is extremely pronounced. I agree with reviews that say that if you enjoy strong tea flavor, and particularly a strong jasmine tea flavor, the Premium Jasmine Milk Tea is exactly that. It's so strong that the store smells floral like jasmine tea, and you can immediately smell it from the drink as well, whereas this note might be more muted at other places.
However, in order to really make that jasmine tea flavor stand out, it's clear they cut back on the milk flavor. And not just the flavor — the drink itself feels a lot less viscous, or thinner, than many other milk tea drinks in the area. Typically you'd imagine a milk tea to have a good amount of body, moreso like a milky drink than a watery drink, but this definitely leans more in the watery side. Which makes a lot of sense: to get more tea flavor, you would need less of the milk flavor. This is one of the things that my friend Maxwell and I have been experimenting with for years (over a decade?) in terms of balancing tea aroma, milk flavor, sweetness, mouthfeel, etc. I have to admit, that as someone who likes a sweeter and thicker boba drink, this caught me slightly off guard. For folks who like more of a tea flavor and a much lighter and less sweet drink, Molly Tea is a winner.
In some ways it's reminiscent of Chicha San Chen, a Taiwanese chain that also recently opened up in Cupertino, in the sense that there's a strong emphasis on tea flavor and less on the milk and sweetness.
But having a very light milk flavor is a delicate thing. I noticed that folks mentioned online that even the oak milk variant of the drink was made such that the oat milk was slightly overpowering the tea flavor already... that might give you a sense of how light the regular milk flavor is. If anything, I'm surprised that they are using fresh milk in their drink as opposed to a milk substitute, which may itself be lighter and thinner when mixed with the tea.
Overall, I'd recommend Molly Tea only if you have a craving for a strong jasmine flavor, want something lighter, and don't want actual boba/pearls(!!) in your drink. It's more like drinking some fragrant jasmine tea with some light milk added, than drinking a "milk tea" or "boba tea" dessert drink. I constantly felt like the drink was "missing" something, whether that was some additional viscosity (thicker mouthfeel?) or boba/pearls to chew on, but that's strictly personal preference.
Some other miscellaneous notes based on reviews online: The parking lot is indeed small, and can be very difficult to park throughout the day. The jasmine whipped cream doesn't seem very worth it. It seems the various tea alternatives (they do have a few oolong options such as dancong, for oolong lovers) are also quite fragrant and tea-forward. It is slightly on the pricier side, but I suspect a lot of the "higher quality" boba places that have been opening lately are all in this sort of "getting really close to $10" range.
On Milk Tea or "Boba" History
If that were the end of this post, I would have just posted it as a Yelp review or something (not that I do Yelp reviews). I don't typically write boba reviews, since I go to so many different boba shops all the time and find that taste is just incredibly subjective, but what followed from my Molly Tea experience was a series of thoughts that kind of spiraled into an entire mini existential crisis about milk tea or "boba," which is what folks now use to refer to the drink as a whole.
But before I can get to the existential stuff, I think some context is needed, especially for those who haven't heard me rant about "boba" in real life before (or read any of my Twitter threads from years ago).
Milk tea is not new. The actual practice of mixing milk with tea has a long history that's spanned hundreds of years (originating in Northern Asia) which then spread to Europe and around the world. The contemporary trend that is regularly referred to as "boba" now or "milk tea" (奶茶 in Chinese), has its origins in mid-1980's Taiwan (not to be confused with Thailand, which I've seen happen a lot especially when I was working at a Taiwanese restaurant, unfortunately). This actually refers to the practice of including tapioca pearls with the milk tea drink — whereas previously, tapioca pearls were a dessert topping (that you ate like in a bowl-based dessert dish), one of the key innovations was the inclusion of this chewy ball in your drink itself. I won't get too much into the details of this origin, which is somewhat disputed, but I'll include some of it in the dropdown below (click to expand).
Origins of Pearl Milk Tea (珍珠奶茶) in Taiwan
Chun Shui Tang from Taichung, Taiwan claims to have been the first to do it in 1987, but they also specify that they mixed the drink using a cocktail shaker such that the drink would be frothy or "bubbly" as well. However, Hanlin in Tainan, Taiwan claims to have done it before them. The stories have been changed and debated over the years, but CST has won out in terms of marketing themselves as the originators. There are some dubious claims that have been made by Lin Hsiu Hui from CST, who claims to be the first one to add the tapioca, though the drink has become a large cultural icon for Taiwan and the story has somewhat been solidified to make the telling of its history cleaner.
What matters is that this drink is primarily concerned with the mixing of tea, some form of milk, and tapioca pearls (which themselves start as tapioca starch that's rolled into balls and often colored black or brown with either food coloring or black/brown sugar).
There are a few important things to note here.
On Milk: The first is that though it's called "milk" tea, this is somewhat of a misnomer as the original drink uses milk substitutes, especially given the high rates of lactose-intolerance in Asia. Typically the "original" pearl milk tea drink would use non-dairy creamer or some other non-lactose half-and-half. This meant that the drink could be cheaper to make and also not include lactose in it, which is kind of incredible given the common notion in the US that milk tea contains lactose by default and requires an alternative. It's only more recently that "higher end" shops started to pivot to using "fresh milk," with some notable chains (such as Tiger Sugar) offering their focal drinks without any tea at all.
On Boba: So where does the term "boba" come into the picture? While the original tapioca balls were often referred to as "pearls" or "bubbles" (珍珠 or zhēnzhū in Chinese), these were typically small tapioca balls, much smaller than what has become predominant in the US (though you can still order small "pearls" at various stores today, with some chains such as YiFang using it as their default, and a shout-out to my partner who strongly prefers small pearls). "Boba" (波霸 or bōbà in Chinese), however, is a variant of tapioca pearls that's much larger in size, which originated from another tea shop owner in Taiwan who wanted something to differentiate his drink and make it trendy. He took the term 波霸 (boba) as a reference to Amy Yip, an actress from Hong Kong, to refer to her large breasts, paralleling the larger tapioca pearls in his drink. (And yes, in recent years there has been some murmurings of how we should use a different term than "boba" because of its sexist origins.)
When the drink first came to the US in the late 1990's (which is a historical project I really wanted to embark on before the pandemic hit), it was referred to as a variety of things in different regions. Interviews I've conducted with folks reveal that the term "bubble" milk tea was predominant in New York, while the Bay Area would start to use "pearls" or "tapioca" more commonly, with regions in between influenced linguistically by the spread of early chains such as "Tapioca Express." However, the dominant region (and often argued as the first region) where the drink became popular in the US was Southern California (specifically San Gabriel Valley), where "boba" became the dominant term used, along with the larger pearls. (There are a variety of possible explanations for the difference in term usage, such as the fact that SGV had a much larger Taiwanese population, whereas New York has been predominantly a Cantonese population, though I've yet to investigate this thoroughly.)
What we do know is that even through the 2000's, there was no national consensus on the term — in fact, at my local high school, there was an insistence on calling it "pearl milk tea" or PMT for short, as opposed to referring to it as "boba," with the topping used as a shorthand to refer to the entire drink itself. It wouldn't be until the mid-2010's that "boba" would become the dominant term used across all of the US, with the rise of Subtle Asian Traits (a Facebook group that originated from East Asians in Australia but quickly became overtaken by Asian American personalities and cultural formations) as well as the franchising of Boba Guys (which to my frustration started in the Bay Area in 2011 but used the term "boba" anyways... among many other frustrations of mine with their racist, labor-exploiting, and gentrifying founders).
By the late 2010's, related terms such as "boba liberals" (which was used on Twitter in 2019 and attributed to Redmond or @diaspora_is_red, though perhaps used or introduced by various others within the "tankie" community on Twitter) began to emerge, consolidating the term and relating it to a sense of pan-ethnic Asian American identity (as opposed to a specifically Taiwanese cultural icon). I have many thoughts on this term, as well as the politics that go with it, and you can likely find some of my tweets with folks like Redmond prior to pandemic about it.
Personally, I don't like the term "boba" and all that comes with it. This sentiment is similarly shared by my friend (and co-conspirator?) Maxwell, who still adamantly refers to the drink as PMT, or "pearl milk tea." However, I do think the term boba is of particular cultural significance, especially as I've argued before that US boba is not the same as Taiwanese pearl milk tea. This goes into an entirely different assertion I've had about how "boba" in the US is actually its own distinct thing, shaped by the various "Asian" cultures here, primarily by Vietnamese chè (dessert drinks). Prior to the pandemic, I wanted to trace the spread of "boba" in the US, going to SGV to find some of the original store owners, tracking down business licenses and paper records of which stores opened first in the US, and following how "boba" would culinarily, linguistically, and culturally evolve into the phenomenon that it is today. I never did pursue that project, partly because of COVID-19 shutting everything down, and partly because I'm afraid to do it (especially with financial and time costs).
All this to say, "milk tea" or "boba" is not as simple as it seems. From its origins to the topping naming to the use of milk, there's so much to say about it beyond the fact that it's a sweet dessert drink stereotypically enjoyed by Asian Americans (though this may be very much true).
Existential Musings
OK, so how does this all fit together? Well, upon drinking Molly Tea, I found myself struggling with the very idea of "boba."
To begin with, like I mentioned in the review, Molly Tea doesn't even sell tapioca balls (they technically do, but I don't really count it if it's never actually offered). If you look at what people are saying about it online, it's branded as a boba shop (because in the US, "boba" now refers to the category of drink), but it doesn't actually have boba at all (none of the larger, black-colored pearls). And yet you'll see folks still talking about it in terms of "getting boba" (and in this post, for simplicity, I've used this phrasing as well).
So what are we even really talking about at this point? Because the key innovation of the 1980's pearl/boba milk tea is the addition of tapioca to the drink, right? Well, that's one part of it. The original CST conception also mentions the use of a cocktail shaker so that the drink is also bubbly — in fact, this is why most of the early drinks are shaken and also referred to as "bubble milk tea," with the bubbles having a double meaning of referring to the pearls and the texture/appearance of the drink itself. There are also some reasons to shake it, such as making it taste smoother, but recent shops have instead opted for their drinks to be more Instagrammable with clearly separated layers, in which case they aren't shaken. So at what point does this drink no longer fit into the family of "boba" drinks? (Family here being a reference to Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblance, which highlights some of the ambiguity in identifying things in common using language.)
Furthermore, Molly Tea doesn't use non-dairy creamer or half-and-half like much of the original pearl milk tea uses — it's through and through just a jasmine tea drink with some very light amounts of fresh milk (and sugar) added. Is this boba? Is this milk tea? Does this really matter?
This is where, on the car ride home, I began to have a mini existential spiral about "boba" as a drink. I began to think both ontologically and linguistically about what boba is, and I think these are two separate questions (sorry logical positivists). An oversimplification of this could be stated as follows:
- Question 1: What is it in terms of the actual drink and ingredients itself?
- Question 2: What does the term "boba" include within the US context?
I do take a strong stance that language means different things to different people, that it doesn't refer to objective things / prototypes / ideal Forms, etc. Moreover, I do think meaning is deeply cultural and contextual, but pragmatically, I care what folks in the US consider as "boba." (I often specify that I really just take interest in US boba, since it's so much more complex even when you start talking about just Taiwan — and possibly the Japanese influences of the drink — and Southeast Asia and beyond.) So, for us in the US, what counts as boba?
Molly Tea reveals to me that you don't even need boba for something to be boba. And yes, this has been true in the past — I have friends who often go to boba shops to order tea drinks that don't even have boba in them. A good amount of people don't like the actual topping, but rather just want a sweet dessert drink. A lot of folks don't even order milk teas, myself included, since we often just want something light and refreshing like a fruit tea. The thing is, even if you don't get the combination of "milk" + "boba" + "tea," most places will at least offer them. Once again I refer back to Maxwell, who truly just orders a PMT (pearls, milk substitute, and tea) at the places that he goes to. He's a purist, but it's a consistent definition of what the drink is and a meaningful comparison across stores. I've taken on the far more expansive version of the term, to include all the milk varieties (creamer, half-and-half, milk powder, fresh milk, oat milk, no milk??), different toppings (pearls, boba, various jellies, sago, etc.), and even different teas. I didn't mention this earlier, but typically ceylon or assam tea is used for traditional Taiwanese milk teas. They're black teas, with quite a bit of body to balance out the milk flavor, as opposed to "jasmine milk tea" or "green milk tea," which is really floral and fragrant, using jasmine tea like Molly Tea does. More recently there's also been a huge turn in stores using various oolongs. For example, TP Tea most popularly pushes their Tieguanyin (Iron Buddha) milk teas, while more "specialist" or "high-quality" stores might try to specify their use of Dancong or Dong Ding, Alishan High Mountain, etc. And of course there was the entire trend of matcha drinks... all this to say, what we see now is very different from the original conception of PMT, down to the pearls, the milk, and the tea.
This matters to me, because it brings up a lot of ambiguity when we're talking about these drinks (a "brown sugar mango matcha freeze with cheese foam" is very different from a "ceylon milk tea with small pearls" for example), with really the only common denominator being that these are pan-Asian dessert drinks, where there's often milk, tea, and/or toppings included or excluded. It does make comparison quite difficult, because we very often put all boba shops in comparison with one another, whereas stores don't even sell the same things (what ingredients overlap between Molly Tea and Tea Top, for example?). Perhaps all of this just means that we shouldn't, or can't, do direct comparisons, since we're talking about completely different drinks — indeed, when folks ask me for "boba" recs, I have to then ask a series of questions to narrow down what they mean by that. And that's something of practical, conversational concern.
I also started to get into a hole about ontology and linguistics, but that's not at all a conversation for this post. All this to say that somehow, drinking this one cup of Molly Tea put me into a shallow philosophical spiral. (I also just came back from Taiwan and it is the start of a new year, so I've already been having a lot of "big picture" thoughts in my head and an urge to write something down.) What a time.
This is possibly the first time(?) I've written out some of my boba thoughts (and historical notes) in a blog post as opposed to a tweet thread, and I do think it is somewhat sad (to me) that I've kind of just sat on a ton of general research on US boba (including its spread, cultural significance, actual drink/culinary aspects, and political connections) and much of it hasn't ever been written and shared out. Possibly if I find more time / energy / funds for it, I'll write some more (that doesn't go into the whole existential spiral like I did here), but we'll see. Until then, I plan on writing some more of my PhD-related research thoughts I've been having over the holiday break. Hopefully I'll be more consistent about posting on my blog this year!!!