Happy Boba Tea (Cedar Park)

For years, I’ve been griping about Austin’s lack of decent bubble tea establishments, or rather that it doesn’t have enough good ones.  I was first introduced to bubble tea in the late 1980s.  My parents came back from a trip overseas to Taiwan, and they brought home a package of these super fat straws, the likes of which I had never seen.  They boiled up a batch of tapioca starch balls that turn into this dark brown pearl shaped thing, resembling enormous caviar, that has a texture the Taiwanese call “QQ” which the closest equivalent in English would be something like “gummy.”  These tapioca balls are also called “bubbles” or “boba.”  The bubbles are traditionally eaten warm, as a sweet dessert soup sometimes with a dash of cinnamon, but my parents put the bubbles into a cup of iced, sweetened milk tea, as was all the rage overseas.  The super fat straws were necessary to suck up the bubble goodness.  I was hooked.  Thus began my love of bubble tea.

Fast forward to the mid to late 1990s when the fad had already firmly established itself in the Chinatowns everywhere, Austin still did not have decent bubble tea houses for me to get my fix.   I do remember sometime in the mid-1990s, some of the Vietnamese restaurants around town began selling bubble tea that just wasn’t quite up to snuff, and then places like Momoko sprouted serving better quality bubble tea.  Nowadays, it is easier to get decent bubble tea if you live closer to the University or Austin’s Chinatown, but those of us in the northwest Austin corridor — meh.  The few places serving it couldn’t get the bubbles cooked quite right, and then we got wind of a new place that just opened in Cedar Park, “Happy Boba Tea.”

We went to check it out.

The tapioca balls are a little too sweet for my taste, but that’s the way hubby likes them cooked.  The texture is perfectly QQ, and that more than anything else makes or breaks a bubble tea for me.  Overcooked tapioca balls are just plain gross and mushy.  I won’t let the kids suck the bubbles straight out of the straw as I’m afraid they will choke on the balls, but I spoon them out.  The kids fight over these bubbles.

Happy Boba Tea like other bubble tea houses will serve up these bubble treats in smoothies, slushies, iced lattes, but I tend to like mine with straight up milk tea or occasionally the flavored tea.  (The drinks can be made without bubbles too.) The first night we came here, they were all out of the tapioca bubbles so we gave the passion fruit juice bubbles a try. (They look like ikura, for those who are sushi fans.)  My kids call these “juicy bubbles,” and there is something oddly refreshing about biting down and having these little juice bubbles burst in your mouth.  They ask us all the time to take them back to the place to get “juicy bubbles.”  I’ll take the regular bubbles, thank you, but to each’s own.

I do hope this place survives because hubby and I sure do love bubble tea, and the kids now are addicted to the “juicy bubbles.” The service is friendly, and the tiny sitting area also has a small crafts table for the kids to entertain them as the drinks are blended.

Happy Boba Tea
2100 Cypress Creek Rd, #300
Cedar Park, TX 78613
(512) 336-2622

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