Bubble Me Bubble Tea is the 4th recent entrant to Colombo’s bubble tea standoff. They offer the most variety of bubbles of the lot, along with some legit slushies and pretty good cold teas.
The Bubble Tea
Six months ago Colombo was a ghost town devoid of bubble tea (I might be exaggerating a tad bit), but all of a sudden we’ve got four spots to choose from, with Bubble Me being the newest of the lot. Their selection of beverages is quite impressive with everything from classic teas to yoghurt teas to slushies. They offer probably the widest selection of bubbles (for a lack of a better word). Besides the usual tapioca pearls, they also offer popping boba, coffee jelly, ai-yu jelly and coconut jelly.
Some of these may not work for everyone, but it’s always great to have more choices. Our favourites among the bunch were the tapioca pearls, coffee jelly and passion fruit popping boba. However, while their prices are on the higher end of with teas at Rs. 380 and slushies at Rs. 480, even their regular cups are quite large. Another little feature we appreciate is the fact they let you choose the sweetness of the teas, but for most people we’d advice keeping it under 50%.
We tried a whole bunch of Bubble Me’s stuff and came away loving the slushies in particular. The mixed berry slush with passion fruit popping boba was a brilliant all-round combo with a great balance of sweetness from the slush and light acidity from the passion fruit. If you’re not a huge fan of fruity flavours, their chocolate & caramel slush also works great with their unique coffee jelly. With Colombo’s constant heat, these slushies will really hit the spot.
We were really excited to see yoghurt teas on the menu but were told that it is yoghurt flavour as opposed to actual yoghurt. While we were skeptical, the end result turned out to be quite pleasant, with our strawberry yoghurt tea working well with the blueberry popping boba.
On our first visit they were fresh out of tapioca pearls, which is generally what we pair with milk teas. So they suggested we try with their ai-yu jelly instead, but unfortunately it didn’t quite work for us.
The jelly itself comes in large chunks that don’t really fit through the straws unless it’s been soaking for a while, and ain’t nobody got time for dat.
We dropped in again a couple of days later to try it out with the tapioca pearls and found it to be far better match for the milk teas, with our favourite being the caramel milk tea and milo, both at 50% sweetness.
One thing we’ve noticed quite often with bubble tea is that the fruit teas are the hardest to nail, and that was unfortunately the case with Bubble Me as well. Both our passion fruit green tea and mango green tea were just too diluted in flavour with neither the ai-yu jelly or coconut jelly really doing much for it.
Ambience & Service
Bubble Me occupies a small space in Thimbirigasyaya just past Bread Talk, with some quirky wall art which we really like.
They’ve got seating for a few, but we can see it being more take-out oriented since they are pretty quick with their preparation time. The folks at Bubble Me are really friendly as well and they’ll suggest the sweetness for the drinks if you’re unsure.
Conclusion
With so much fresh competition, Bubble Me will inevitably be compared to the rest. We loved the slushies with the coffee jelly and enjoyed the milk teas and yoghurt tea as well, but they’ve got room for improvement with the intensity of their fruit teas.
