Elliot's View

Details: Located at 40-10 #A, Main St, Flushing, NY 11354. Official site is https://en.tigersugar.com/

Score: 6/10

Tiger Sugar is the newest, most popular bubble tea place in Flushing. The line is perpetual and always about an hour long. Is it worth an hour wait? No.

Tiger Sugar is a bubble tea place that’s popular around the world. It opened it’s newest and only branch in New York City recently and the lines have been ridiculous.

Here’s a picture of what it looks like before shaking:

First, you get in line to order. This is a long line of usually forty people and yet it is a deceptively long line. The main reason is because each person on average orders around eight cups of drinks each time. So in a line of forty people, you’re waiting for about three hundred and twenty drinks to be made ahead of you. And that is a conservative estimate.

After you order, there is still a wait in that you have to wait for everyone who ordered ahead of you to get their drinks. They have an electronic sign in the front that counts down orders, but it’s usually blocked by people so you’re just going to have to listen for your number.

I saw some people on line carrying bags of thirty drinks away. I overheard a middle aged Asian woman tell someone that she bought a dozen drinks, not because she was going to drink them, but because she was hording them and now had the problem of finding people to give them away to. The point is that people are going nuts over this stuff and the wait will be long.

In total, I waited well over an hour for this cup of tea. It’s not really tea though. A lot of places are now selling brown sugar bubble milk drinks, which are mostly milk and sugar.

I ordered the brown sugar boba milk w. cream mouse. It was okay. Maybe slightly above average? Here, they use Horizon Organic milk instead of Lactaid or some other kind of dairy creamer, which is higher quality and more nutritious, but not substantially different in taste. The thing with brown sugar milk boba drinks is that the tapioca is boiled in brown sugar. After mixing the tapioca with the milk, you get a kind of tiger striped effect, hence the name Tiger Sugar. The tapioca was warm while the milk was cold, exactly the way it should be. It cost about six dollars after tax.

Overall, this place was fine. Was it worth the wait? No, not at all. You’re better off going somewhere else for it. There are now a lot of competitors who also make brown sugar milk drinks and go through the additional step of making the tapioca warm, which is essential in my opinion.

Score: 6/10