Boba Quest: Surreal Creamery

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

Surreal Creamery is not your typical boba shop; on first glance it looks like an ice cream shop. But at least from my point of view, it's enough of a boba shop for Boba Quest 2025 🧋 — a significant amount of their menu is boba and they even have a "dollar boba club" membership.

Plus it's starting to feel like summer. What better way to kick off the warm months than by talking about boba ice cream?

I visited the West Village location at at 126 MacDougal St next to Washington Square Park, accessible via the convenient West Fourth Street station, with A, C, E, B, D, F, and M service. A bit farther is the recently renamed Christopher Street–Stonewall station with 1 train service.

Just like normal boba, you can mix and match ice cream with tea and toppings, but I ordered one of Surreal Creamery's "signature floateas": earl grey ice cream with earl grey tea with boba.

The main difficulty with boba in ice cream is that it gets cold (duh). This ends up getting in the way of the texture of the boba, because it tends to stiffen after like 10 minutes or so, which definitely hinders the experience.

With that in mind, here's my rating:

• Boba: 2/4 all things considered, I thought the boba was decent. It wasn't really sweetened, which was probably the right call given how sweet the ice cream was. And it did stiffen as I was finishing it up, but that's unavoidable.
• Tea & ice cream: 4/4 if I scored the two separately, I doubt either would get full marks. But together they're fantastic; the ice cream melted nicely into the tea to give more of a milkshake vibe.
• Bonus: 1/1 it's ice cream and boba, that's already plenty special.

Total: 7/10 A solid option for a hot summer day. Also, it's not super obvious in the picture, but these are huge and probably best shared with someone else.

P.S. they have a "monster cookie" ice cream flavor, which is just vanilla, except for the fact that it's very blue: