TBarr in Brookline (Part I)

I decided to go to TBarr in Brookline as my first bubble tea house to visit because I saw a post on WeChat that shows pictures of the coolest cup that have milk tea in-their famous split cup.

According to their website (http://www.tbaar.com/index.html), TBarr started out in New York city initially. They claim that all their ingredients came directly from Taiwan. Their slogan is Making Life Fresh, which tells us that their specialty does not only limit to tea beverages but also smoothies.

With high expectations, I took Green Line D train and got off at St.Mary St. station.

It was quiet a sunny day. The store locates at Beacon Street in Brookline.

It didn't take me long time to find the store although it is locates at "underground".

As you can see, there is a sign outside the store to show you where it is.

It was around 11:30am when I got there. There were only 4-5 customers. The store is bigger than I expected.

The first couple of things that I noticed were the menu light boxes on my left.

And without too much thinking I decided to go for the split cup drink (which is shown above). Any reason? Because I want to show to all my friends on Snapchat (lol). How cool it is to have two different types of drinks in one cup.

But that's not all I ordered.

Another thing caught my attention, which was...

Crepe cake!

At the risk of gaining too much calories, I ordered both the Strawberry Yogurt & Mango Green Tea in a split cup and the Matcha Green tea crepe cake. The total was 17 bucks. A little pricey indeed.

Let's start with the drink. Aside from looking cool, the taste of it did not match my high expectation as both flavors tasted pretty normal. The strawberry yogurt was nor too sweet or bland. The texture was very liquidy and far from having the texture of yogurt. I would say it tasted like a strawberry yogurt flavor drink. What was more disappointing was that there was no strawberry in it as shown in the advertisement light box above.

The other half of the cup was a little bit better. The mango green tea had a lot of rainbow jelly, which definitely worth a praise. However, like its other half, the flavor was nothing to be bragged about. It tasted like a normal mango flavor drink that was not made of real mango. I hate to conclude that the whole drink was very normal even though its container was cool.

For the cake part. I liked it better than my drink. It was not as sweet as the cakes you would normally have in American restaurants (sorry). And you can feel the layers in your mouth. The only downside of the cake was the lack of the green tea flavor. I think the sweetness overpowered the green tea flavor. I expected I could taste the bitterness of green tea.

As I thought I was done with being surprised, I found out that the shop actually sells Chinese crepe!

What is Chinese crepe?

Well...

Now I know I need to come back to this place later as I have to try their Chinese crepe. Who knows you can have Chinese crepe at a bubble tea house? Ohhh. I also need to have their milk tea.

Overall, I feel neutral about this place. I was expecting my drink to be made from real fruits. And it turned out it was flavored drink. But I still got to take a picture of the famous split cup.

We are even.