Found: Affordable Bubble Tea in Sunset Park

Bubble tea goes by many names: tapioca tea, pearl milk tea, boba; it comes in even more flavors and varieties: hot or cold, liquid or blended slushie, infused with ginger, almond, taro, blended with fruit or mixed with red bean. It has been a personal quest of mine to test and compare variations of this Taiwanese invention wherever I find it, but unfortunately this is an expensive habit in this city. I was introduced to the drink at Quickeley on Bancroft in Berkeley, and every trip home includes almost daily visits to its new Durant location (where it has dropped the locally inspired spelling and become “Quickly”) for the 99-cent tea special, which, with tapioca pearls added, comes to the reasonable price of $1.19. The “bubble milk tea” flavor is a straightforward black tea, creamy and satisfyingly sweet. It’s either incredibly simple or incredibly strange that gelatinous spheres, milky tea and ice could combine to create such a refreshing treat.

But simple or strange, it is not to be had cheaply in Manhattan. The standard price I’ve found is $2.95, and that’s usually for the more basic flavors – if you want something like taro or red bean, you may be paying well over three dollars. So I was elated when I discovered City Café in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, which offers a long list of bubble tea flavors for only two dollars. I ordered the black milk tea, thinking it was best to try out the basics at a new place before venturing into more complicated flavors. City Café’s version tasted extremely creamy; it was probably made with half and half or even some condensed milk. Its sweetness balanced nicely with the aromatic quality of the black tea. It was refreshing, but definitely sugary enough to serve as dessert. Most importantly, it was not overwhelmed by ice (a major pet peeve).

Brooklyn’s Chinatown in Sunset Park consists of a strip of 8th Avenue between 42nd and 61st Streets. Though it’s much smaller than Manhattan’s Chinatown, it can get very busy at certain times of the day, and the bustle is due more to locals going about their daily activities than hordes of tourists looking for handbags. The avenue is lined with produce stalls, and exciting fruits like lychees, starfruit, and durian are all easy to find. I bought a bunch of lychees with their stems still attached, and the collection of spiky globes looked like some kind of beautiful alien bouquet. The strip culminates at 61st street with the Hong Kong Supermarket, a comprehensive source of Asian specialty foods. For fresh groceries, Chinese snacks, and the added bonus of reasonably priced bubble tea, 8th Avenue in Sunset Park is certainly worth the trip. And if, unlike me, you’re not crazy enough to walk the 9.5-mile roundtrip journey from Park Slope, the N and R trains both stop nearby.