YaoCha (Auckland CBD, New Zealand)

How many milk tea / bubble tea shops does Auckland have? There are no stats for this that I can find online but roughly based on searching Google Maps, there are at least 19 just in Auckland CBD alone and the if we are talking about the whole of Auckland region then there are at least 104 results that came out. These are just the registered shops in Google but definitely there will be more than that. For a population of 1,700,000 each shop can cater for 16,000 people, while it may look like that is a large number to cater for each shop, if you live in Auckland it feels there are a lot of them because its everywhere. I guess out of those 104 we tried at least 30 and the latest one that we tried is Yao Cha located in Chancery Square.

Like most bubble tea shops they all have their gimmicks to attract people, some offer popping boba, some with Pokémon boba, other with hand drawn drawings on their cups, good visual aesthetics, even shops offer Instagrammable friendly seating but with Yao Cha I guess they don’t have such gimmick but one thing different about this place is that you can grab something to eat with that bubble tea you are having. From Crispy BBQ Pork, Braised Beef, Crispy Chicken even Crepes and Daifuku they have it.

We came here just after dinner but if we did not, then I would be tempted ordering some of those delicious treats but for now we will stick with their bubble tea offering. We grabbed two items on this visit first was the classic Dirty Milk Yaocha (NZ$10.50) and the other one was Mango and Yakult (NZ$9.50), initial impressions were good, they came a large plastic cup with a good amount of boba. Dirty Milk Tea tastes like dirty milk tea, its more on the creamy side compared to some with a slight hint of the tea, brown sugar is caramelized giving you that charred taste. The boba was cooked really well, it was chewy and bouncy. For the Mango and Yakult it was sweet and sour, I love this but it does not have that strong flavour from Yakult, if Yakult is not in the name of the drink then I would never knew it was that flavour and I would not expect it to be, flavour wise, even this was the case I really liked it since I am a big fan of sweet and sour drinks.

Overall it was a good experience, place was really clean, and the staff were super amazing. The bubble tea they offered was good but not surprising, it was just a bubble tea done right.

Yaocha
Address: 8 Courthouse Lane, Auckland CBD, Auckland 1010, New Zealand