Tea Time at Taft

Wherever the money goes, the business follows.

Being in Taft Avenue puts you at the center of where the money is. You have St. Scholastica’s College, De La Salle College of St. Benilde and De La Salle University all bunched up in one area. The number of your potential consumers is staggeringly high on a daily basis. And even without school, the number of condominiums in the area might supply you with enough residents to taste your wares.

Business will forever be a competition of who can make it better in the world of something popular. The biggest market would obviously cater to the primary need: the food market. And as a sub branch of that, tea places have grown in popularity.

Taft Avenue is a perfect example of saturating that very market.

There are exactly eleven places in the area to get your fix of milk tea. I don’t know if there’s any place I haven’t visited yet. But yes,eleven milk tea shops in Taft area alone.

Let me enumerate, by location:

1. ChaTime, One Archers
2. Tea Stack, Castro
3. Taroshii, Agno
4. Tea Delight, Agno
5. Zen Tea, EGI (And Zen Tea behind CSB)
6. Pao Pao Xiao Chi, Zaide Cafeteria
7. Simple Line, behind CSB
8. Tea Central, Taft (above Starbucks)
9. Universitiea, second floor of Army Navy, behind Zark’s Burgers
10. Cha Dao, University Mall
11. MoonLeaf Tea Shop, Harrison Plaza

See what I mean?

Now with so many tea places to choose from, how do you know where to go? Well, let me tell you something about them.

ChaTime.

ChaTime has gained a reputation for being a snooty, top price tea shop. Because it is. It’s the more serious tea place that actually uses fresh tea. But just because it’s all snooty about the tea doesn’t they make it less enjoyable. There’s no question that ChaTime’s drinks are both deliciously refreshing and creative.

What I dislike about ChaTime at Taft isn’t the tea, because there’s no questioning ChaTime. It’s the fact that it’s a small place you couldn’t stay at. Hoping for a bigger branch, but this is Taft.

Tea Stack.

The good thing about Tea Stack is how the inside is decorated. It’s very clean, minimalist, Asian-modern with stone walls and white wooden tables. It’s a perfect hang out for any group of friends. The marketing/publicity & labelling is all well designed too, as if they had to hire a professional or some passionate student with a tumblr account and PhotoShop to make their labels.

The bad thing about it? It still has a relatively small tea selection, and it closes down in the summer. Also, its attempt to recreate Happy Lemon’s Cocoa with Rock Salt & Cheese is, in my opinion, nowhere near a success. If you have Jasmine Tea there, though, you really will taste the Jasmine. And I mean, it feels like you’re eating flowers. I don’t know what kind of tea they’re using. But it can be as expensive as a drink from ChaTime with quality that doesn’t live up to the price. Tea Stack’s strength lies in its originality, when it’s not trying to copy something else. The Chocolate Macadamia Milk Tea is a unique and rich in flavor.

Taroshii.

This is a student-owned establishment, so I was told. And they’re doing a pretty good job at it. They have really good Wintermelon Milk tea here, and I think I like it better than Moonleaf’s. Taroshii isn’t exclusively a milk tea place, but also has hot cocoa and espresso-based drinks as well as different kinds of milk shakes. It’s kind of a ChaTime-Happy Lemon mash up. They make really creative mixes with fun names to match them. Some of my favorites are the Apple McCartney & John Lemon.

Tea Delight.

Is a place to get iced tea while eating lunch, that’s all that it is.

Zen Tea.

I’d like to consider Zen Tea as the mother of all this madness. In my freshmen year, it was the only tea place around the area. I’m guessing that it’s due to its success that other milk tea brands have seen LaSalle as a potential Milk Tea Capital. What’s good about Zen Tea is that you can mix around with fruit flavors to get the tea that you want, just like Tea Delight. It also has a selection of yogurt tea, cream tea, and your standard Naicha, Taro, etc. It covers all the basics, and that’s what makes it a good place to get tea from. It’s not as snooty or as high class, so it’s accessible in a sense. It’s more of something you can get to drink when you’re thirsty while studying, or something to drink with your lunch, rather than a treat you buy like ChaTime.

The design of the place is pretty nice. The EGI Taft branch has a second floor seating area that now showcases a sizable aquarium, some dark ratan-woven seats, etc. The furniture stays in Black and White, while the walls are painted red. Everything keeps in with a nice Asian tie-up design. It makes for a great place to stay and study . . .  when there aren’t too many people making noise in the line for their milk tea.

Pao Pao Xiao Chi.

I don’t get why there’s an award certificate attached to it. Their wintermelon tastes like brown sugar syrup.

Simple Line.

Actually some pretty good Milk Tea, imho. Not my best, but nowhere near the worst.

Tea Central.

Tea Central is a nice small place right across a card shop. They certainly have a wide range of playful milk tea mix choices on their menu. For milk tea alone, they have hazelnut, creme brulee, lychee, and a number of so many others. They also have something I haven’t seen in other tea places yet–ice cream blended tea drinks. They include some pistachio and chocomint drinks. They also have yakult drinks and your standard fruit flavored iced teas. Their add-ons include the standard pearls, grass jelly, coffee jelly and egg pudding. Their drinks can get a little too sweet and playful for my taste–but that’s just me, and I’m a serious type tea drinker. But for fans of Happy Lemon but are confined to Taft Avenue, this would be a good place to try.

Universitea.

This place seems like a campus-specific Tea place that hails itself all the way back to–guess where–UP. But now, it’s on TAFT Mode. The place even has photographs of the old DLSU in black and white framed up on the wall. A beam is covered in cork where everyone can pin up posts. You can even tell the friendly staff to let you plug in your music player into the speaker system. And there’s a cushioned seating area in the corner to put your feet up, in case you’d like to read or chat with a friend–heads up, though, you have to take off your shoes. It makes for a great hang out despite the size of the store.

The tea, however, can slightly be disappointing. But refreshing enough for an afternoon drink. Not really something you treat yourself to, and definitely not something you’ll end up craving for.

Cha Dao? To be honest, I don’t even remember the name of the place.

It’s a small new spot in the second floor of University Mall, wedged between the Mexican food place and the Binalot. I seriously don’t remember, simply because there’s nothing memorable about it. The taste of the Nai cha is a bit too sweet, and the design of the place seems not to aim for any sort of ambience. They do have a flatscreen TV perched up on the wall, and they play a good DVD every so often.

Moonleaf Tea Shop.

Nobody needs to know what I have to say about Moonleaf Tea Shop, especially about the one at Harrison Plaza, simply because you must have read about it multiple times before on this blog.

Yes, all those links to some sort of review about Moonleaf, but if you’re not interested in reading multiple long things, these are a few things you need to know. Their service/staff is incredibly friendly, and in a few visits, they’d remember your name. They have wifi, and well-positioned plugs. In fact, the entire design of the place seems to be student-centered. It’s a clean, fresh-cut design, both fun and modern but laid back and sharp. The tea menu is creative, but the tea itself is some serious business making for some seriously good tasting tea. Price ranges from 45-80. All their cakes and snacks are provided by some nearby independent bake shop, so it’s different most of the time.

And now that you’ve heard about all of them, I hope you don’t get too confused. Try out all of them–it’s an adventure all on its own. Remember that a vast majority of these are Filipino owned (Moonleaf, Taroshii, TeaStack) and supporting them will definitely help the economy in some small way. I think. I don’t know, could we stop caring about the economy and concluding paragraphs for posts and just have tea?

Yes. Yes we could.

Many thanks to the people I mooch pictures off:

http://www.marvindegracia.com/2011/10/universitea.html

http://onthefword.blogspot.com/2011/11/game-on-at-tea-stack.html

http://www.spot.ph/eatdrink/46836/top-10-bubble-tea-spots-in-the-city/3

http://www.thirstyblogger.com/pao-pao-xiao-chi-milk-teas-fruit-teas-and-more.html

http://foodiestation.blogspot.com/2012/02/simple-line-milk-tea.html

http://chuvacosmo.blogspot.com/2011/01/coming-soon-tea-central.html

http://everydayfoodbites.blogspot.com/

http://thephilippinesandbeyond.com/2010/10/zen-tea-at-egi-taft-tower.html

http://elorasayswhut.blogspot.com/2011/06/food-blog-zentea.html

http://haniebernardo.blogspot.com/2011/09/chatime-at-one-archers-place.html

http://xkurenaix.blogspot.com/2011_07_01_archive.html

Always support Filipino bloggers and writers, and read around the place! Cheers!

The Astral Line of Thought

Caution: Incoherence up ahead. Written at four in the morning, left unedited and totally raw. All thoughts disorganized. No fluid train of thought. Just shotgun. This post is prone to severe fragmentation. Beware.

Eyelids, dropping. Head, bobbing. Room, spinning. Vision, blurring.

The knees grow knobby and the wrists, rather wobbly; your entire body is out of its bounds and yet, the mind successfully flies through with ease. It is as if everything else is uncontrollable, falling and floating without due restraint. It’s like your entire life is a puppet, and the strings have been cut. You jumble and you fumble, and use rhyming words within prose, and write—and write rather protractedly so—about just how sleepy you are. But despite all that nonsense you can’t seem to get a grip of, you think like a genius. The best ideas and the most productive thoughts you have come around when you least expect it, when you least prepare for it. That next stroke of genius, that next goodbye you bid your writer’s block uncannily comes to you at four in the morning.

Poe, Baudelaire, Wilde and a good number of other writers—among all other types of genius—have testified to crafting some of their very best pieces in a state of utter intoxication. Poe was an alcoholic; Baudelaire was a druggie; and goodness knows what Wilde was intoxicated with. But for whatever it was they took in, it made them amazing at what they did, and they wrote with such ease, such mastery, such insanity that they couldn’t accomplish such a feat when staying clean and sober.

Was it the rum? Was it the Hashish? What was it that made them so incomparably terrific?

It is the addiction. The addiction to the self-destructive. Total self-giving to something that will consume one’s existence to its very core. See, it isn’t about taking drugs, or drinking and letting your body go numb and just letting your mind fly off that makes you such a genius. Seems to me like intellectual mastery and artistic caliber are bought by selling your soul to some thing.

In Get Him to the Greek—and oh god, I love Russell Brand movies—Brand’s character, Aldous Snow argues with his ex-wife Jackie that he’s stayed clean and sober for seven years. Jackie answers back, commenting on how he exhausts himself with exaggerated yoga. “There’s nothing you don’t turn into a drug,” she forced through her lips; her voice, trembling through the tears she tried to choke back. She had watched her husband slowly sell his soul, and let him kill himself with absolutely anything he could, and it killed her in some, indirect, altogether twisted way.

The thing is, everyone has an addiction. Everyone has something to cling on to and dedicate everything to. Everyone has a personal demon that consumes their every second and invades their every thought-space. Everyone has something missing in them, something imperfect about their lives; everyone uses something to fill up that large, gaping hole that apparently leads up to a massive vortex sucking everything in. Everything, and every bit of you.

And you might like to disagree with me; perhaps you don’t drink as much, or don’t smoke as much. Perhaps you don’t do drugs either. But maybe I could interest you in something more homely and familiar?

Ladies and gentle, I present to you the best and most advanced in skills enhancement—the worst drug known to mankind: sleeplessness.

As you lose control of every joint in your body, as you lay in bed with your eyes closed, your mind continues to wander around places and think up strings and streams of although coherent, however irrelevant words and concepts. In your mind’s eye, the clouds are purple and silver, strained through sieves of silken hair. The earth is floating through a molten bowl of green apple gelatin, and the air is soaked with the dense, bitter scent of peppermint green tea. Life is crunched through gears of a laser clock going backwards, then forwards, on an infinitely alternating half-loop. You’re now thinking of everything and anything that you could ever think of, but all you do is lie in bed and think of it. It is perhaps the worst feeling in the world, when your head is pounding, your throat is sore, your eyes are stinging, your shoulders are tired and your ankles are numb—and yet you have the thought process with the speed of a bullet train.

As we type, I am in bed with my eyes closed, typing this down. (Hurray for touch-type.)

But why are we so addicted to this kind of self-torture. Why don’t we just head off to bed and write this all down in the morning. Why can’t I just let myself sleep? Why is it that regardless of the academic year, I just can’t help but give myself a night or two without sleep.

We tire ourselves out, purposefully, but subconsciously decide to. It is in the nature of man to be addicted to the self-destructive; for it is in the defiance of this process of productive suicide that one proves he can overcome destruction, and pain, and physical human limitation.

So when you’re sleepless, you practically give the system of the universe and all things that exist a much needed, ‘fuck you, I’m hardcore.’ Sleeplessness, workaholism, alcoholism, drug addiction, everything—every single thing that is destroying you is what you keep closest to you, as your personal favorite form of rebellion to the heavens and likewise to the depths of hell.

Fuck sleep, I’ll go update my blog.