Bubble Tea Quotes

“In Taiwan, where bubble tea was invented, people have been drinking Chinese tea styles with milk since Dutch colonization in the seventeenth century. But milk tea-- specifically, Indian black teas where milkiness is as important as the tea-- arrived late, some time around the Second World War. As the story goes, a former bartender, Chang Fan Shu, thought to serve it cold, and shake it like you would a cocktail. When he did this, the fats and proteins in the milk allowed it to form a foam, and he made what people started to call bubble tea. Some shops started serving iced versions, shaken like a cocktail. And then in the eighties, in a Taiwanese tea shop-- and nobody can agree which one-- someone had the idea of adding chewy pearls of tapioca starch to the bubble tea, making bubble tea-squared. New variants quickly appeared. Earl Grey boba tea. Milkless jasmine green tea or osmanthus versions. A lot of the time the tea was lost completely, most notably in the crystalline pop fruit flavors such as lychee or mulberry, although also in milkshake-like blends like lilac taro.”
― Ruby Tandoh, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a book.”
― Jennifer J. Chow, Death by Bubble Tea

“Bubble tea isn't one thing but an umbrella term for a miscellany of Instagrammable drinks, many of which don't have tea, milk, or even tapioca pearls. They can be fruit-based, or blended milk with chestnut purée, or high-concept versions made from scratch with oolong and hand-rolled pearls. You choose a base tea, add-ins, sugar and ice levels, milk types and whether or not to get a top of sweet-salty cheese cream-- a thick, plush foam head, which gives black tea the visuals of a pint of Guinness. Depending on the drink, you can choose hot or cold. The permutations are seemingly endless-- even the most seasoned off-menu Starbucks drink aficionados can get overwhelmed by up to a thousand possible routes through the menu.”
― Ruby Tandoh, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now

“Bubble tea is so big among Gen Z and Millennials that for the first time in my lifetime, there's a genuine challenge to the supremacy of coffee shops. It's a generational shift. The last time a food took off this quickly in Britain, it was the fifties, and it was hamburgers.”
― Ruby Tandoh, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now