The Bay Area’s boba scene is crowded — and increasingly upscale. Old guard shops with neon straws and shelves of sticky board games often exist steps away from premium brands with interiors resembling Apple stores, touting loose leaf tea, fresher ingredients and correspondingly higher prices. When one of these new chains from Taiwan or China arrives, lines flow out the door.
To better understand this rapidly changing landscape, two bubble tea enthusiasts on the Chronicle’s Food & Wine team trekked a mile through downtown Berkeley, a city that’s home to more than 15 shops, to try five popular chains clustered around the UC Berkeley campus.
Taiwanese tea houses invented boba in the 1980s, combining tea, milk, sweetener and ice with tapioca pearls prized for their springy “QQ” texture. A decade later, a wave of Taiwanese immigration brought boba shops to California, where they became critical third spaces for generations of young Asian Americans and their friends to study and socialize. Now, its conventions — adjustable sugar, fruit flavors, foams and more — have spilled into mainstream American beverage culture, appearing at the likes of Peet’s Coffee, Dunkin’ and Sonic…