Boba Quest: Shiny Tea

As part of Boba Quest 2025 🧋, I'm trying and reviewing a new boba shop each week.

As I wrote about last week, one of my favorite boba shops, Shiny Tea, is closing soon (now extended to May 17th). Knowing that time was running out to fill up my privacy-preserving stamp card, I brought two friends with me to review it: Emmie and Wen.

We headed over to the Upper West Side; it's located at 2667 Broadway Ave. Getting there via the subway is easy, you can either take the 1 train to 103rd Street or if you don't mind walking a few minutes, the 96th Street station has 2 and 3 service as well.

I ordered my usual jasmine green milk tea with boba, 100% sugar and less ice:

• Boba: 3/4 the boba was solid, with good flavor and texture. (I previously would have called it perfect, but I've had better)
• Tea: 4/4 exactly what I want out of a jasmine green milk tea. Nothing more to say on that.
• Bonus: 1/1 Shiny Tea doesn't really have any ambiance, you can barely stand inside of it. But it makes up for it in great customer service and its privacy-preserving stamp card.

Total: 8/10.

Emmie was truly dedicated to the cause of helping me fill out the stamp card and ordered two drinks. (But also she said she felt like having two drinks.) Both were worth consuming in her words — she didn't throw them out unfinished or regret it — but found them a bit disappointing.

The first one she had was a taro milk tea, regular sweetness, no ice, with boba:

• Boba: 3/4 the boba was fine, enjoyable, tasty, but not spectacular.
• Tea: 2/4 maybe I'm too picky when it comes to taro, but I didn't enjoy it that much. I think there was too much milk and something about the taro wasn't to my liking.

The second drink was a mango green tea with lychee jelly:

• Jelly: 3/4 standard enjoyable jelly in tea. Nothing special.
• Tea: 1/4 - what I really wanted when ordering this was something more akin to fruit juice, but I didn't see mango drinks on the menu that were closer to what I was thinking of. I wasn't a big fan of the tea flavor, but I think it's primarily a personal preference.

Emmie did not award a bonus point, agreeing with Wen (keep reading) that it was small and cramped. Fair enough.

Totals: 5/10 and 4/10.

Wen ordered a classic milk tea with 30% sweetness and less ice. Notably he did not get boba nor any other topping, despite this being a boba review series. SMH

• Boba: n/a
• Tea: 3/4 I wasn't blown away by the tea flavor but it was decent, and it was also a good level of sweetness.
• Bonus: 0/1 the shop was tiny, so we had to wait on the sidewalk for our drinks. It also got cramped quickly with multiple customers.

Congrats to Wen for managing to break my meticulously devised rating system, but I think we can add it up to 3 out of 5, or a total of 6/10.

It is a bit disappointing when my friends didn't enjoy one of my favorite places as much as I did, but that's one of the fun things about boba, everyone likes it in their own particular way. And yes, even if you don't like the actual tapioca balls, we can still be friends.