You cannot swing a straw in this town without hitting the cellophane top of a milk tea cup. China's largest Chinese-language dining review site, Dianping, currently lists over 300 milk tea purveyors and there are thousands of reviews on the ever-increasing varieties of milk tea flavors, including such ostensible grotesqueries as "pudding tea," a netizen favorite.

After witnessing the take-over of every available stall and cranny by peddlers of milk tea, I decided to conduct some empirical research into the phenomenon, focusing on three of Dianping's most highly-recommended and fast-expanding chains: Happy Lemon with 14 branches, Qmore (C多多) with three, CoCo (都可) with six.

Over thousands of years, the cultivation of Camellia Sinensis and the refinement of ceremony and tea accoutrements were perfected. And now, I wondered, have we climaxed or reached a nadir with the invention of a powdered tea with large chunks of pudding served up in a plastic cup? To find out, I spent several days sucking down sugar water.

And the ratings:

Café 85 (Dianping flavor rating 21) is not only over-run with frantic pastry-shoppers, but their pudding milk tea is a cloying, milky water with not enough pudding involved. I couldn’t finish it.

Happy Lemon (20) has many fans of its "Pearl Sago Roasted Milk Tea." To me, it tastes like milky water and lacks strong tea flavor, not even mentioning roastiness. And points are deducted for slow service. On the positive side, the tea's not too sweet. And the logo is cute. Actually, I noticed that a puke-cute logo seems to be a prerequisite in this business. Happy Lemon's "Cocoa Milk Tea with Puff Cream" even sounds cute, but any chocolate flavor barely registers. However, it does have a very thick creamy-tasting goo mixed in, which tastes better than it sounds.

Qmore/C多多, with a slightly higher Dianping rating (22), also offers "Roasted Milk Tea," which I got with grass jelly cubes. The tea is way roastier and creamier than Happy Lemon's. It even has a light, caramelized aroma. Qmore's netizen-favorite "Mango Freeze" is chock full of mango–I watched them whip it up in the blender. It's a refreshing, affordable, real-fruit smoothie.

CoCo has the highest rating of the bunch (25). Their pudding milk tea has a full-bodied tea flavor with a mellow aftertaste and a massive amount of custard-like pudding, which tasted a bit like very moist yellow cake. A fellow tea-taster pronounced it "the best milk tea" she's had. We have a winner! Plus, the all-male staff at the Wujiang Lu branch were the friendliest crew of the lot, genuine and smiling. Perhaps modern tea culture has a future yet–and Dianping reviewers are providing a road map.

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