Answer Tea
Answer Tea is the first Canadian location of the popular Chinese chain specializing in fruit teas and bubble tea with printable cheese mousse.
Cheese mousse is an increasingly popular addition at most bubble tea shops around the city, but this flowery blue cafe is definitely the first to offer mousse you can print a picture on to.
With over 500 locations around the world, Answer Tea's first foray into the Canadian market takes the form of a Tiffany-themed shop (future shops will have different themes) complete with an Audrey Hepburn poster and walls awash in Tiffany blue.
After three months of renovating the old computer repair store this space used to be, a wall of fake florals now stands as the perfect backdrop for the inevitable number of photo shoots expected to happen here.
Equipped with a machine that does latte art printing, Answer Tea can print any picture directly on to a thin layer of cheese mousse.
Just scan a QR code with your smart phone (recent models only) and pick a photo from your gallery. The machine will process the picture and print it on to your cheese mousse drink with an impressive degree of accuracy—until it starts to melt away. If you don't have any selfies or cute pictures on your phone, you can also get a randomized photo of Peppa Pig or Sailor Moon, for instance. Or you can get some text.
It's just 50 cents to get a custom picture; it's included in the price for the cheese mousse, which isn't the best mousse out there but more than makes up for it with the optics.
You can only add it to cold drinks like the honey peach fruit tea ($6.49), which has pieces of real fruit.
The Lipstick Prince ($6.89) uses lychee and red dragonfruit, which, according to employees, are all sourced from a Chinatown market next door.
Also using dragonfruit is the Sunglow Slush, which contains a dragon fruit- and white peach-flavoured jams too.
These Answer Tea fruit jams are custom made flavourings made and shipped from headquarters in China in order to give all their drinks worldwide a uniform flavour. All fruit teas contain some flavour of jam or another.
If you're less into the fruity stuff, there's an assortment of green, black, and oolong milk teas like the Dirty Black Milk Tea ($5.79) made with liquid black sugar.
Bubble tea enthusiasts will appreciate the novelty of Answer Tea's printed cheese mousses. Despite the fact latte art printers have long existed in the city, it's a monumental moment in boba history to get that service on cheese mousse, and in such a pretty space too.
Answer Tea