SilalaTea adds Japanese treats and mochi donuts to bubble tea offerings | Food & Drink

Co-owners Jessica Silalahi and Stefan Makiya-Harry opened SilalaTea on March 1. They both of those grew up in California, but heritage-smart, she’s Indonesian and he’s Japanese, figuring out as Black-Okinawan. They look as youthful as they are: 22 and 23, respectively. They started out this bubble tea shop just after he was medically discharged from the Air Power. And it is a really exciting house, decorated in section with Japanime posters and tons of Funko Pop dolls, with a mini arcade corner on a stretch of fake grass. The (notably cost-effective) vivid beverages and treats match all the vivid hues on exhibit.

A single part that sets SilalaTea aside from the other boba sites is their default use of Lactaid (lactose-free of charge) milk foundation (unless of course soy or almond milk are asked for), catering to the allergen group. Nevertheless I recognize no change in the taste of my drinks: a Murasaki milk tea and pandan grass jelly milk tea. The to start with is a shiny purple ube consume. Bear with me mainly because this is baffling, but Murasaki is how you say purple in Japanese, and there is a Murasaki sweet potato (with red pores and skin and a white core) and an Okinawan sweet potato (with beige pores and skin and a purple main), but ube are purple yams with a purple-toned light, white pores and skin and purplish-white interior, so not the exact same factor. Anyhoo, this drink’s amazing with its nutty vanilla-ness and added sweetness from flan-like egg pudding jelly added (as a person of the 6 toppings the menu lists). The pandan leaf-flavored grass jelly tea retains an similarly vibrant, light-weight environmentally friendly coloration and preferences tremendous sweet until finally I suck bits of the dim grass jelly by my straw, which preferences like a concentrated black tea, powerful and tannic, to counter the floral sugariness. I like it, you may possibly not.

On getting into SilalaTea you’ll discover on the countertop a colourful pastry situation loaded with mini mochi donuts — a few for $5 or 6 for $8. I keep on theme with a simple ube, an ube included with chocolate glaze and pretzel garnish and an ube coated with vanilla frosting and Oreo crumbles — each have a salted caramel drizzle. The rice-flour dough’s dense and spongy, enjoyable texturally and really starchy, not as well sweet on its have on the basic donut. The icings are not as well sweet both, but insert respective chocolate or vanilla tones, nevertheless the pretzels on mine are overly comfortable and stale, distracting from the joy the Oreo wins the working day many thanks to the cookie taste.

Two additional snack offerings may be special to city (as these bubble outlets go): chia pudding cups and obanyaki. The first are soy milk-primarily based and arrive in three flavors I adhere with ube above strawberry or brown sugar. I’m a admirer of the soaked chia seeds that sweat their healthful goo into a swirl of deep purple ube foundation, but I don’t care for the commercial vanilla pudding topping, which has always struck me as cloying and artificial. (I could just go for a canned coconut milk topper.) The obanyaki are a little “wheel cake” (preferred as road meals or at festivals) that look variety of like a fluffy hockey puck created from pancake batter, into which goes your alternative of sweet filling I finally split my ube streak and go for the standard purple bean filling (although matcha’s damn tempting). Like ube in its very own way, to me, sweet purple bean has its own unique taste that is a minimal hard to explain but unmistakable and delightful, not extremely sweet with a trace of savory starch.