Mr. Wish Watermelon Slush: It’s just pure, unadulterated watermelon juice. 3.0/5.0
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Mr. Wish Mango passion fruit babo drink with aloe: I was sad when I learned that Mr Wish in Flushing had closed, but the franchise has quickly expanded to many other locations in the city, so it’s actually easier to find now. I purchased a mango and passionfruit babo drink with aloe from the Williamsburg location. Originally I thought babo was a typo, but it’s a name they’ve given to their carbonated, non-tea fruit drinks. They just use fresh fruit, so I didn’t adjust the sweetness level. The textures in this drink, from the fruit pulp to th... (read more) 3.5/5.0
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Nature's Soy Black sesame soy milk: I love Asian soy milk, which tends to be a lot less sweet and taste of actual soybeans/tofu compared to American soymilk (there's a very good chapter on this in the book Organic inc.), so when I went to Hong Kong Supermarket in Chinatown NYC, I checked out the refrigerated, fresh soy milk options. This brand happened to have black sesame and matcha soymilk, two of my favorite flavors. Since the half gallons we're quite large and black sesame is a bit more unqiue for this category, I purchase... (read more) 4.0/5.0
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Nohohon Iced Matcha: I was really excited to finally try this small matcha shop on St Marks, where matcha beverages are whisked by hand to order. To judge the quality of the matcha alone, I opted for the iced matcha instead of their lattes. While I enjoyed the experience of entering the small storefront through their traditional Japanese Noren curtain and watching my beverage made, with hot water poured into the whisked matcha with a wooden ladle, the positives end there. The matcha was bitter with no complex... (read more) 1.0/5.0
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Otafuku x Medetai Red Bean Taiyaki: Otafuku x Medetai is a small Japanese to-go street food shop in the East Village specializing in okonomiyaki, takoyaki, and taiyaki. Taiyaki is a classic Japanese dessert with a fish-shaped waffle exterior and different fillings inside (traditionally red bean). They make all their taiyaki from scratch here, filling their detailed custom molds with batter and producing 6 fishies at a time, all of which you can watch. This was probably the freshest taiyaki I've had -- it came out pipping h... (read more) 4.5/5.0
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PaTea Brown sugar oolong milk tea with boba: I really love living in NYC, but one thing that was missing for me was a mom-and-pop super-asian bubble tea shop, the kind that has an overwhelming number of flavors that isn’t a major chain like Gong Cha or Coco. Those types of shops are omnipresent in the Bay Area, but not so much here. However, that gap has now been filled by PaTea, a very small bubble tea shop a few blocks away from Union Square. There, they have the “chubby” bucket-sized bubble tea cups in a variety of milk and fruit te... (read more) 4.0/5.0
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