Cha For Tea

My all time favourite bubble tea outlet. Still remember how excited it was to find one of them when I was aboard. I love their 珍珠奶綠, which is the bubble green tea. Its recipe has an excellent ratio of milk and tea. And most importantly the chewy pearls! I have always believed that their signature milk tea tastes a lot better with the pearls. I would have come more often if the queue wasn’t that long. It is awesome for both the iced and hot version. The shop is also serving other drinks as well as selling Chinese tea leaves.

Nice, Ten Ren Tea Station basically for Hong Kong, dubbed as 天仁喫茶趣. Based on multiple visits in the last 2+ years (plus having had Ten Ren drinks in Taipei) I have to say this location comes pretty darn close.
Comparing Ten Ren tea drinks in Northern (and Southern) California to this Hong Kong location:
Prices in Hong Kong are dirt cheap in comparison, nothing really above US$ 2 on average.
Quality is easily x2 to x3 than that in NorCal (and quite possibly SoCal)
Thus we pay x2 to x3 as much at ½ to ¹⁄₃ of the quality, bottom line.
Employees are very efficient. A ten minute wait for a drink after paying, is considered a hellish wait even if the line seems long. Even if one of the employees is slacking off, he or she is washing/​rinsing cups or blender vats in one hand, and surfing social media/​checking texts with the other. Multi-​task slacking and getting drinks out the door.
And some of you out there have no qualms about 1.5 hour wait for ramen (or a food truck), or 45 minutes for a watered down tapioca milk tea drink. Sigh.
This Ten Ren also has a limited selection of imported Taiwanese tea, tea snacks.
Octopus (MTR/​subway/​public transportation) cards accepted for payment (stored value card).
You can sip on your drink while browsing books and magazines in Eslite bookstore.
Honey green tea, some matcha based drinks, even a classic like Chrysanthemum Pu-​Er, are all very good. Honey green tea, even if semi diluted, is still better than the crap in the States… the Wattes…(like Lattes in coffee shops, except Watte is water with a shot of tea).
What more can you ask for?

Located inside Taiwanese bookstore Eslite at Hysan Place, cha FOR TEA is no doubt a strange place for a drink stand — and cha FOR TEA is a bit of a strange name, too. The strangeness aside, this place sure is popular. The first time I saw the crowd lining up, I was curious as to what they were waiting oh-​so-​patiently for, only to find out that it was a drink stand!
I would say the novelty of this place — authentic Taiwanese drinks and all — has started to die down compared to the early days, but you should still expect to have to line up. I have only tried a few drinks here, mainly because I just don’t have the patience to wait. The bubble tea here is pretty good — the pearls are chewier than in other bubble teas I’ve had, though the tea itself is just typical milk tea. The green tea latte here isn’t bad either. It’s served piping hot and the latte itself is really smooth. The green tea taste really stands out, but isn’t so strong that it overpowers the latte. It is said that the taro-​based drinks here are really good because they make them out of actual taro, but I’ve not given them a go yet.
One thing’s for sure — cha FOR TEA has definitely brought Eslite a considerable amount of human traffic! I mean, just look at that line of people stretching all the way out to where the lifts are!