San Francisco: T Pumps

SF is a tough place for pearl tea businesses.  Competition is fierce and if your pearl tea is bad, you won't last very long.

But if that's true...why is T Pumps still alive?!:

Not only is it alive, it's JUMPIN'.  The line when we went was insane:

TT and I judge every new pearl tea joint by their black milk tea with pearls, so that's what we ordered:

Not only did we wait forever for our drink, we also felt ancient while doing it.  Everyone around us looked like they were in high school.  While we were feeling sorry for ourselves, we noticed something terrifying behind the counter.

Coffee-mate.  WTF?

We should have known then that the tea would be bad.  Heck, we should have been tipped off when we saw that most of the staff were not Asian.

No, even before we cleared the front door, we should have known better.  When one of the staff brought out samples of their strawberry coconut tea (blech...so sweet, so artificial!), we should have jumped the hell out of that line and escaped with our wallets intact.

Our black milk tea finally made it into our hands...and the first thing I noticed was that the color was too light (actually, I voiced my concerns early on that everyone else's tea looked super light and super...pastel-y).  We each took a sip and reached the same conclusion: they forgot to add the tea.  It tasted like very, very watered down milk.  UNACCEPTABLE.  We couldn't even finish it.

I haven't felt so strongly about something in a long time.  Who are all these kids in line at T Pumps?  Yea, it's cool that you can choose to combine flavors in your tea, but can't they tell that they're basically drinking sugar syrup and Coffee-mate?

I don't care if you have a shop in San Mateo.  That's NOT OKAY.


T Pumps
1916 Irving St
San Francisco, CA 94122
(415)