While Pochi does offer sweet and savory crepes, fried snacks, toast, and other treats that can only be described as teen food, what draws the kids is the bubble tea. Also known as milk tea, boba, pearl tea, and zhen zhu nai cha, this iced tea and sweetened milk drink gets its name from both the froth of bubbles floating on top and the giant black tapioca pearls lurking at the bottom. Bubble tea is another feat of the teenage imagination.
Evolving from the more traditional red iced tea sold out of street carts in Taiwan about 10 years ago, bubble tea was born when some fanciful vendor decided to add a little passion-fruit juice and shake it together in a cocktail shaker until it foamed. The fad swept the nation, spread all over Asia, and made its way to the West Coast of North America via Vancouver, BC's large Asian community.
A loquacious Taiwanese teenage girl at the International District's Piece of Cake Hong Kong Style Bakery persuaded me to sample her bubbles about five years ago. I had no idea what I was ordering, but I was enamored with the packaging. Milk tea is served in clear cups with dome lids and sucked through straws fat enough to allow passage of the marble-sized tapioca. As evidenced by the many websites devoted to bubble tea, the look of this drink is half its pleasure. I never knew iced tea could be such an iconic object, but strange photographs of bubble tea posing with arrangements of fruit and baby's breath decorate Pochi's windows. My first bubble was a shocking green-apple color and tasted like watermelon Jolly Ranchers, only sweeter, but it was such fun to walk around sucking up the black gummy pearls that I found myself seeking out milk tea elsewhere.
My personal favorite is bubble tea made from brewed green tea and sweetened condensed milk. Pochi uses real brewed tea ($2.75), but flavors it with syrups and powdered milk--hence the extensive list of flavors, ranging from lychee, sesame, star fruit, or durian to the more pedestrian mango. Seasonal fresh fruit juice is available ($3.50), as well as hot drinks ($2.50) and bing sa, otherwise known as the smoothie ($3.20). Tapioca pearls, or tiny cubes of coconut jelly (also suckable), can be added to any drink for a mere 50 cents.
As I learned from calling the Minute Tapioca 1-800 number, tapioca is derived from the root of a tropical plant known as manioc, or cassava. The distinctly unpleasant stringy root is peeled and grated, and the juice is extracted, breaking the starch down into a flour. This thickening flour is then combined with water to form large, pre-gelatinized blobs, which are shaken onto a hot plate, where they gelatinize into discrete "pearls," which are then boiled just long enough to soften. It is essential to have fresh pearls in bubble tea. Softer than Gummi Bears and much tastier, pearls have such a satisfying texture that little kids refer to them as "boba," or, as we like to say in English, boobs.
Pochi does not consistently offer the best bubble tea I've ever had, but the boisterous teen scene makes up for it. Asian fashion magazines abound; there are always at least three card games going on; and despite the abundance of smoking, the place feels somehow healthy, perhaps due to the proliferation of light. Unlike coffee shops, with their colder, nose-in-a-book-of-poetry aesthetic, no one sits alone at Pochi Tea Station.
Pochi Tea Station
5014 University Way, 551-3144.
Mon-Thurs 11 am-midnight, Fri 11:30 am-2 am, Sat noon-2 am, Sun noon-midnight. Cash only. $.
Price Scale (per entrée)
$ = $10 and under; $$ = $10-$20; $$$ = $20 and up.
