Too Popular? Boba on the Brink

It’s dusk as Michael Scott strolls out of Lollicup, a tiny boba bar in West Los Angeles, like a man just rescued from a desert after days without water. “I love Lollicup,” the Westside graduate student says, clutching a green apple milkshake studded with the gelatinous tapioca balls known by their Chinese name. “I’m way addicted.”

Southern California is crazy for boba . A Taiwanese invention of the past decade, the chewy balls started out as additions to black tea with sweetened milk, popular in Chinese tea and coffee shops in the San Gabriel Valley. Now, they have been added to an almost unlimited variety of beverages, including those that don’t include coffee or tea at all.

And their popularity has spread far beyond Monterey Park. Boba bars have opened up all over Southern California, especially in Pasadena, Westwood (which has at least half a dozen) and the pan-Asian eating strip of Sawtelle Boulevard just north of Olympic Boulevard, where Lollicup recently became the fourth boba cafe on a short two-block stretch.

Lollicup’s arrival is good news for Scott. His boba consumption used to be limited to trips to Monterey Park, where his Chinese girlfriend introduced him to boba milk tea at one of the dozens of tea houses in the area. (Chinese speakers often look awkward when asked what the word boba means--it’s “big breasts.”)

Boba devotees are a picky bunch. “Other places?” says Patti Chang, Scott’s girlfriend, a Lollicup fan, too. “We don’t go to them any more. And we no longer drive out to San Gabriel, either.”

Some boba fans want fast service. Others swear by made-to-order iced tea. Some want their boba to be large. Others want it small. Some swear by heat-sealed plastic lids. Others reject them. One bar’s tea is “too sweet”; another’s “too expensive.”

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There is perhaps no more competitive area than the two blocks of Sawtelle north of Olympic. Three of the four, including Lollicup, are so close you could almost yell out an order and be heard in all three.

For two years, Sawtelle’s first boba bar, Relaxtation, was unchallenged. For Westsiders who didn’t want to make the drive to the San Gabriel Valley, this cafe with Internet access was your hangout. Now the area is a boba breeding ground.

While the bars first sprang up to serve the area’s large number of Asian students, today even conventional cafes, such as one at the UCLA business school, include the tapioca balls as options in coffee. This fall, moms at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Nursery School gathered poolside at the PTA president’s home for a back-to-school “tea” that included catered mint-flavored milk and passion fruit drinks with commercial boba that come pre-cooked in a vacuum pack.

A year ago, CJ Cafe moved in a few doors from Relaxtation. Last spring saw the arrival of Volcano Tea House, a brightly lighted cafe where young Asians come to play Chinese “jump chess,” play cards and read Chinese magazines.

Only weeks later, Lollicup appeared. This latest boba bar, tucked around the corner on La Grange Avenue with barely standing room for two, is across from a YMCA. It’s mainly for take-out, but if you want to linger within earshot of the 405 Freeway, you can sit at a tiny patio table on the sidewalk.

Most of the bars count on large numbers of students and young professionals. Unlike, say, Starbucks, to which they are frequently compared, the boba bars don’t open for morning commuters but rather run from midday to midnight or later. On weekday evenings, groups of people in their 20s wearing Quicksilver sweatshirts and Diesel jeans gather in knots on the sidewalk near the Sawtelle-Olympic intersection, chatting, smoking cigarettes and sucking boba through thick plastic straws.

“We come because we’re all students,” says Michael Armida, a UCLA linguistics and computer student drinking a boba latte at CJ Cafe on the ground level of a two-story strip mall. “We have to stay awake to work and we come here instead of drinking coffee.”

At any boba bar around Los Angeles it’s easy to find a customer, usually a business major, who dreams of starting his or her own boba cafe, presumably with an eye on replicating Starbucks financial success as a publicly traded company. In fact, Lollicup is part of an international chain of boba bars, with headquarters in Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver and Taiwan.

But there’s a catch. Boba Love may come at first chew, but there’s not always a lifelong commitment. “When a boba place first opened on the UCLA campus, I drank it three to five times a week,” says Angel Ho, a UCLA psychology student. “Then I couldn’t touch them, and now I’m OK again once a week, but often I can’t finish them.”

As a way of keeping customers interested, some bars have introduced light snacks. Relaxtation hosts musical events and readings. Others, among them Lollicup, rely on theatrical flourishes during boba preparation to win people over. For a black pearl tea, a young man behind the counter pours chilled tea into a silver cocktail shaker, sloshes in some sweetened milk and jostles it for a few seconds. “See,” he jokes. “We’re bartenders.”

Most of the bars hand out stamp cards for a free drink after the first eight, nine or 10. But not everyone is impressed. Judy Fei, a bank clerk, thinks that no Westside venue matches the bargains to be had in the San Gabriel Valley, where she lives. There, tea places have “buy one, get one free” policies, and drinks cost $2 instead of $2.50. Tea Station, her favorite in San Gabriel, offers a set lunch with free drink and parking.

Giovanni Sagun, a former date (now “just a friend”) whom Fei met on the Internet, looks crushed. Maybe it’s that he and Fei seem to be “ boba incompatible.” She’s a Tea Station girl, while he’s committed to Lollicup. “Each place has its own vibe,” says Sagun.

Already, choice has become a big issue among customers. The hip crowd wants something more than plain milk tea, and boba bars compete among themselves to introduce new recipes. At Relaxtation, there are juice and milk drinks, including watermelon crush, pina colada splash and black sesame tea. Lollicup lists 116 different drinks on its menu, including “four-color pudding soymilk” and kumquat lemon jelly juice. Volcano Tea House names 65, including milk teas made with jasmine, taro (a purple tuber also used to make chips), honey, almond, coconut and wheat germ. They also serve coffee-based boba drinks, including a boba -studded cappuccino they call a Bobaccino.

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Jackie Su, co-founder of CJ Cafe, says that his boba drinks are superior to others because they use a removable domed plastic lid instead of a strip of heat-sealed plastic applied by a dispenser--the technique used by Lollicup, Volcano and others.

Volcano serves smoothies and “bubbles,” frothy concoctions made with fruit syrups. The specialty of the house, however, is spicy fried chicken. The chunks of dark meat and basil leaves are served in disposable carry-out bags with wooden sticks to spear them.

Shinki Kakihara, a student in Van Nuys who grew up in Osaka, Japan, tried Volcano recently because he said the tapioca balls in Relaxtation’s drinks were getting smaller. (Carlos Amador, a manager for Relaxtation’s Sawtelle branch, denied any change.) On the other hand, his friend Chihiro Kawamura, an acting student, found her Volcano milk tea is “too sweet.”

There’s only one thing the two agree on. Their favorite cafe isn’t on the Sawtelle strip at all. It’s Boba Bar in Studio City.

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Boba Bar, 12044 1/2 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. (818) 763-4790

CJ Cafe, 11301 Olympic Blvd., #107, West Los Angeles. (310) 231-9155.

Lollicup, 11270 La Grange Ave., West Los Angeles. (310) 445-3327.

Relaxtation, 11301 Olympic Blvd. #103, West Los Angeles. (310) 473-3668.

Tea Station, 158 W. Valley Blvd., San Gabriel. (626) 288-3785.

Volcano Tea House, 2111 Sawtelle Blvd., West Los Angeles. (310) 445-5326.