Weird food: Bubble tea
FIZZING flasks of luminous green liquid, a blackboard covered with scientific squiggles and two men in white coats hunched over a bubbling pot…
Welcome to Bubbleology! This isn’t a science lab but a cool café in a cobbled Soho street that specialises in Bubble Tea, a Taiwanese speciality of milk and fruit teas filled with tapioca or jelly balls.
I’m handed a plastic cup filled with a murky, mushroom-coloured concoction. Tiny, black balls that look like frogspawn lurk at the bottom and I eye it warily…
This is taro-flavoured tea, created from a vegetable that’s like a sweet potato, native to south-east Asia. Surrounded by tea-sipping hipsters, I slurp at the warm, grey liquid through a fat straw. It’s an unusual flavour, with hints of liquorice and cinnamon, and the tapioca balls are chewy, like gnocchi.
Bubble Tea: Lumpy but tasty
The sensation isn’t unlike like drinking minestrone soup but, with the balls the size of an orange pip, thankfully there’s no danger of sucking up too many at once. The pearls are filling, making the drink a meal in itself, and though they don’t taste of much on their own, they infuse the tea with a caramel flavour.
Bubble Tea is named after the bubbles caused by the shaking of the tea when it’s made rather than the ‘bubbles’ of tapioca. Originating in the 1980s from a single stall in Taipei, it’s created by blending fruit teas and adding tapioca pearls made from sweet potato, cassava root and brown sugar.
Gathering a cult following in Australia, Canada and America, it was in New York that Bubbleology founder Assad Khan first tried it. Thinking it would be popular in the UK, he was trained by bubble tea masters in Taiwan before launching Bubbleology, Britain’s first specialist Bubble Tea café in London last April.
A tea-volution: Queues of people waiting to try Bubble Tea
Focusing on the quirky nature of the tea, he decked the café out like a mad scientist’s lab and it was an instant success, with 400 cups of tea being sold each day. A pop-up café in Harvey Nichols soon followed and the brand is about to launch in Poland.
The café boasts 13 flavours of tea including kumquat, passion fruit, taro and almond and the staff are always creating new flavours.
“I like to mix the fruit and milk teas as they go really thick like a milkshake,” Bubbleologist Alex tells me. “I combine strawberry and vanilla or coconut and mango.”
What’s the weirdest flavour he’s created?
“One woman wanted me to mix lychee, papaya and vanilla, saying it tasted like washing up liquid,”he remembers. “I tried it and she was completely right but it still tasted nice in a strange way.”
After gulping down my Taro Tea it’s time to try the passion fruit flavour. This one is infused with jelly pearls filled with lychee juice. It looks like a kiddie’s cocktail – Lilt-coloured liquid with chunks of jelly sweets at the bottom. Refreshing and punchy,the jelly balls provide a real taste sensation, exploding in your mouth like popping candy. It’s a little too sweet for me though – one sugary cup would have me bouncing off the walls.
Drinking a beverage with lumps in it might not be everyone’s cup of tea but with lots of flavours to choose from, a quirky venue and a wacky taste sensation Bubbleology is definitely worth a try.
Bubbleology, 49 Rupert Street, London, W1D 7PF, 0207 494 4231
Weird Foods 
i like the sound of this, but I don’t really like fruit teas. Are they more like milkshakes?
Yes, the milky teas are like a thick milkshake. You should try them!
There’s also a bubble tea place in Camden Market – but I’m not that fussed on their stuff – may have to try this place instead! It’s big in Japan too, which means that it is/was pretty well known in Christchurch, New Zealand. I think if you find the right flavour, you’re easily addicted!