Bubble Tea

Bubble tea is Taiwan’s most successful export and its most abused one. At home it is still a tea drink with a texture joke at the bottom: tapioca pearls cooked until they are glossy and just shy of sticky. Abroad it often becomes a milkshake with a tea rumor.

Two Taichung shops have spent decades arguing about who poured the first pearls into tea in the 1980s. You do not need to pick a side. You do need to taste tea, not syrup.

How to drink it

Order by tea, sugar, ice, then toppings. “Half sugar, little ice” is the sentence that separates a drink from a dessert. Pearls should give with a slight tug, not collapse into paste and not bounce like rubber.

Milk can be powder, fresh, or none (a lemon or winter melon tea with pearls is a different, legitimate drink). If the menu is thirty flavors of cheese foam and brown sugar, you are in a dessert shop. That can be fun. It is not the historical object.

Night-market cups are for walking. Tea shops are for sitting and noticing whether the brew is oolong or a generic black. Both count.

How to order

The cashier will fire questions. Useful answers:

• Ban tang — half sugar
• Shao bing — less ice
• Zhen zhu — pearls

Vegetarian is easy; vegan is not always, because dairy and honey hide in toppings. Ask if you need to. And if a stall hands you a cup that is mostly ice and caramel, you were warned.