Wikipedia says it originated in Taiwan, and I have heard that elsewhere:
Really? Where else have you heard that? 
I’ll ditto the comments (a) in favor of tapioca and (b) noting that different shops have varying quality standards (inferior bubble tea is decidedly meh).
If you don’t like the tapioca, I’d recommend trying one of the alternatives, such as pineapple jelly. They tend to have much stronger flavors than the tapioca. For example, during the summer I’ll often get a watermelon slush with pineapple jelly.
Also, can anyone confirm whether “boba” is slang for “boobs”? I read that a while ago, but keep forgetting to ask the proprietors of my local shop.
What you really want to avoid are the cheaper powder based teas with stale tapioca. That would turn anyone off.
just got back from a trade show for the coffee/tea industry. Enjoy if you like it while you can. The word (even from people selling it) pretty much was that the fad was on the way out and if you arent already selling it, don’t bother.
You can buy the tapioca balls for bubble tea at an Asian specialty market and make your own, probably just as good as at the shops. So despair not, bubble tea fans!
The shop here in Ithaca is a bubble tea specialty shop, so if the fad goes out, I guess the shop will fold. Here’s to hoping not.
A local Vietnamese chain restaurant sells this stuff.
Tried it once. It was fine, except for the bland, chewy dough-spheres. And the cloying sweetness. And the flavor, actually.
Lemon-lime or something. It wasn’t even tea. In fact, it sucked.
I do like Thai tea, even though it tastes vaguely like someone blended cream and sugar in a used spittoon.
According to the Wikipedia article cited above:
…“bubble” doesn’t even refer to the Taioca (or other jelly-like) “balls” in the tea, but to the fact that it is blended to produce bubbles. If true, this also implies that it’s not a misapplication of “boba” tea (unless “boba” means “bubble.”
This seems pretty weird. Why would you go to all the trouble of putting bubble-like edible beads in this stuff and then name it “bubble tea” after some unimpressive bubbles that just happen to be in the same product? awfully suspicious!
I haven’t seen this stuff up here in the Boston area. But, this being Boston, it’s probably here somewhere. It sounds like an awful mutant product, like that “Orbit” soft drink of a decade or so ago that had similar edible balls in it. I can easily miss this fad (I hate tapioca.)
See I find that dubious because I rarely see boba in tea or coffee places. I see it in dedicated boba establishments. And if a fad is on the way out… why do I keep seeing new Boba places open and none of them closing? And if the fad was so large as to prop up a tiny industry within an industry why didn’t the big boys (Starbucks, Cofee Bean) hop on? Perhaps it is on the way out the same way that those tiny cottage drive-thru coffee stands were big for awhile and then largely went away… doesn’t mean nobody drinks coffee anymore. How they get it now is different.
I had a Taro slush boba from Lollicup last night (one of the many Boba chains around SoCal) and it was delicious.
Well…most of the smaller coffee shops got hit real hard with the push for bubble tea a couple of years ago. In most places in the country it is sold in coffee shops, not in stand alone places. I had a coffee supplier try to convince me to not worry about espresso so much and concentrate on bubble tea a couple of years ago (I didn’t bite, didn’t really like the stuff that much).
Its the way trends go in this industry, it hits the trade shows first, then the distibutors start pushing it, and then the fad stuff dies out and they move on. It takes time to build up a market with your customers and it doesnt do them any good to get you started then pull it.
The people I saw telling everyone it was a dying fad were the suppliers your little bubble tea shops are getting all their mixes and supplys from. They were the manufacturers that make and sell the stuff and they were advising people that its run its course except in predominately Aisian and some college comunities. My tea supplier did rather interesting lecture charting out the sales in differant kinds of tea and yerba mate. bubble tea was listed in the fad section and from the figures he showed it was definately on the decline. He had an intrest in selling me bubble tea stuff, but he had more of an intrest in not pissing me off by selling me on a dying fad.
Who knows, maybe it will make a comeback. My area of expertise is coffee, not bubble tea, I’m just telling you what the guys who make the stuff told me.
Because distance-spitting contests are more fun (and tasty!) with bubble tea than without.
I’ve definitely seen it in Chinatown.
My guess for the origin of “boba” is that it comes from one of the Mandarin names for the stuff (from Wikipedia):