KOI Cafe (Marine Parade)

With the new entrants like Koi Café, 贡茶 and the long standing Each-A-Cup, the bubble tea industry in Singapore has once again been revived. Well, we have never been fans of bubble tea. Somehow, we just don’t seem to appreciate the fuss and long queues over it. Hence, we have never thought of trying Koi Café before.

But that doesn’t mean we haven’t try Koi Café before. In fact, because of friends, we had the chance to try 2 different flavours – Macchiato Green Tea (50% sugar level) and Cacao Barry (100% sugar level).

The Macchiato Green Tea differed from conventional milk tea; there wasn’t a need to shake the cup to ensure a homogeneous mixture of milk tea. On the contrary, we must never shake the Macchiato Green Tea as it is meant to be a layered drink. It was made up of around 1/3 layer of fresh milk and 2/3 layer of green tea. There weren’t any pearls and we weren’t given straws. Rather, we were given a small plastic knife to make a hole for us to drink from. Pretty interesting. But we weren’t exactly blown away or deeply impressed by our Macchiato Green Tea. It tasted mediocre.The first mouth was largely fresh milk, as you drank further, you get to slurp in more green tea. And towards the end, it was just green tea. Overall, it felt like the typical ice cream float, but in this case, with vanilla ice cream topped over green tea. Ok, we are no connoisseurs of bubble tea/milk tea. We just felt that the best thing about Koi Café is that we can determine the sugar level, so 50% was just nice for us.

The Cacao Barry was bought as a treat from a friend. Given a choice, we would probably not choose 100% sugar level. The Cacao Barry was meant to be dark chocolate, so adding too much sugar would seemingly destroy the essence of drinking dark chocolate. And true enough, Cacao Barry (with 100% sugar level) was too sweet and it tasted like Ice Milo. However, in this version, we get to taste the pearls. And Koi’s pearls are indeed pretty good. It was on the softer side, slightly chewy and not overly huge. It had a subtle sweetness and was pretty commendable.

We have never had milk tea cravings and ultimately, we would never queue for it either. Milk/bubble teas are still not our cup of tea.

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there are two types of bubbles here, big and small. i've tried both and they presented quite different taste. the small ones all gush into your mouth everytime you suck on your straw, and it's quite overwhelming the first time i tried. haha. it's qt nice actually. cos u'd feel all satisfied being stuffed with pearls in your mouth. lol

but if u're like me, who likes to chew on pearls, maybe u'll still like the good ol' big pearls. so good to bite on!

tea wise the flavour taste pretty authentic, the original that is. very aromatic tea taste. the variant flavours are qt normal. i tried the choco and it's just like cocoa powder? but they're nt stingy in the flavour tho so it's really rich.

a little more costly than the normal ones like sweet talk, but for that few cents more you can taste more authentic and aromatic tea, so try it someday!