Covid couldn’t burst this bubble
If you’ve been wondering where Montrakran and Stan, from Kaffir Lime Cafe, have disappeared to, just look across to the other side of Oxford St and you’ll find them.
After owning the Thai cuisine restaurant for nine years, the couple felt it was time to reduce their work obligations and focus on just one of the products they’d introduced to the menu a few years ago.
An Asian speciality drink known as bubble tea had proved to be hugely popular, so Stan and Mona decided to sell the restaurant and open a cafe dedicated to the drink.
A unique-looking beverage, bubble tea is a Taiwanese recipe made by blending a tea base with milk, fruit and fruit juices, then adding the signature “bubbles” — yummy tapioca pearls that sit at the bottom.
“Fruit tea is made with jasmine tea and milk tea is made with Assam tea,” said Stan, “although [for] the milk tea [we use] a non-dairy creamer so both teas are gluten-free.”
The tapioca pearls that
make bubble tea so special were originally made from the starch of the cassava, a tropical shrub known for its starchy roots that was introduced to Taiwan from South America during Japanese colonial rule.
Late last year, Stan and Mona began to work on creating their new business Bubble & Snoh, hoping to have it opened early in 2022.
Then in December disaster struck, in the form of an arson attack on a building where the couple were storing all the new stock and machinery while the shop was being fitted out.
This setback, combined with the emergence of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 in January, meant the opening of Bubble & Snoh had to be delayed.
Finally, last month, Mona’s dream of opening a speciality drink shop in Levin became a reality — and has proved popular with locals.
The Snoh part of the shop’s name refers to a Korean shaved ice dessert, which is a cross between ice cream and traditional shaved ice, with sweet toppings like chopped fruit, condensed milk, fruit syrup, and red beans.