Bubble Tea
A newer Yaohan Centre shop that steams its own taro and ube in house instead of reaching for powder, which shows up clearly in the texture of the milk lattes. Fruit teas and matcha round out a short menu. Find it on the No. 3 Road frontage.
Taro made from powder and taro made from steamed taro are not the same drink, and once you have had the second the first tastes like chalk. The difference is texture more than flavour. Real taro leaves body and small lumps behind, while powder gives a smooth purple sweetness that could be almost anything. Asking a shop which one it uses is a reasonable question and a good filter, since the answer tends to predict everything else on the board.
And Drinks trades inside Yaohan Centre, on the No. 3 Road frontage in the Golden Village. Yaohan is the mall to point people toward when they want the food rather than the shopping. This corridor holds the densest run of Chinese-Canadian retail in the country inside roughly a kilometre and a half of road, and each mall along it has developed a personality. Aberdeen is the big one. Parker Place has the stalls people stay loyal to for decades. Yaohan sits in the middle of them and has the advantage of facing the street rather than hiding behind a lot.
A short board is usually a good sign in this category, because a shop offering ninety drinks is generally assembling them from the same handful of bases. Order below the default sweetness on a first visit. That is the only way to tell whether the flavour is coming from the ingredient or from the sugar, and it costs nothing to find out. Weekend afternoons across the Golden Village malls run busy from lunch onward, so a weekday stop is the calmer version of the same errand.
In the Golden Village neighbourhood of Richmond.
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Other bubble tea shops and nearby businesses in the Richmond directory.
An Aberdeen Square shop steps from the SkyTrain doing dessert-like drinks: taro and purple sweet potato milk, oreo slush with cheese foam, salted cream toppings. More indulgent than most of the strip, and the portions are generous.
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An Aberdeen-area shop that stays open close to midnight, which is why it turns up on every late-night Richmond boba list. Fruit teas and milk teas with the usual topping range, ordered from a small counter rather than a sit-down room.
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A long-standing Golden Village Taiwanese tea house that is as much a restaurant as a boba shop, serving rice plates and snacks until late. Handy when half your group wants dinner and the other half only wants a milk tea.
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An independent Golden Village shop that pairs its bubble tea with Hong Kong egg waffles and ice cream, so most orders leave with a drink in one hand and a waffle in the other. Afternoon and evening hours only, running later on weekends.
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A family-run stall in the Richmond Public Market food court that has been pouring milk tea for more than twenty years, long before the Golden Village boba boom. Also does fresh fruit drinks and Taiwanese wheel cakes. Cheap and unpretentious.
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An unusual crossover at No. 3 and Cook: fruit-forward bubble tea on one side, French-style low-sugar cakes on the other. Mango pomelo sago and passion fruit teas get ordered most, and the cake boxes make it a gift stop as well.
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