Boba craze: El Centro and Calexico’s boba tea shops
IMPERIAL VAL
LEY – Adjacent to some long-standing favorite stops for snacks two semi-new local tea shops are continuing the grow the local boba tea craze.
In the old Garcia Market shopping center on S. 4th Avenue in El Centro, boba tea specialty shop “Happy Machapy” is located adjacent to Family Dollar, while a little service window colorfully decorated with Japanese lamps “Neko Boba House” sits tucked between the C-Mart gasoline mini-mart and a car wash on the corner of E. Cole Boulevard and Andrade Avenue in Calexico.
The boba duo are two out of three boba tea restaurants which opened in their current locations in the Imperial Valley since October 2023. Happy Machapy, which started out of a home by owner Wiing
Tse in Calexico in 2020, moved to its current
1109 S. 4th Street, Suite B location in El Centro around Halloween, while Calexico’s Neko Boba House opened in November 2023.
The third, The Boba Shop in El Centro, is located near Imperial Valley Press on N. 8th Street in El Centro, opened in December 2023, as previously reported by this newspaper.
As The Boba Shop is the youngest of the trio, Happy Machapy and Neko Boba House have had a little more time for positive reviews to pop up online since moving to their current locations.
“Thanks be to God that we’ve had a good response to our boba,” Wiing Tse, the owner of Happy Machapy who hails from Mexicali, told IVP in an interview on Wednesday, March 27, in Spanish. “We have return customers,” she said.
HAPPY MACHAPY
Though first opening in 2020 as a micro-business in Calexico under another name, Tse said it took her and family business a few years to move to their current location in El Centro due to a mix of issues stemming from the COVID pandemic, such as adding a kitchen and restaurant design to the current El Centro location as well as time needed to get their food service and other qualifications in order to open the right way.
“We haven’t had any negative reviews: they come here, try our boba, and come back for more,” Tse said. “We’ve had one customer that came back three times in the same day, later with his spouse and again with their child in the evening.”
Tse said what sets Happy Machapy apart from other businesses is not only their fresh boba teas – customized to their customers’ orders – but also the different cuisines they serve for lunch and dinner such as their varied pastas, soups, stir fry, and potato-based creations.
Some of their menu items are chicken alfredo, chicken chipotle; tempura or garlic shrimp; cream soups of broccoli, corn, spinach or ham; or baked potatoes such as chicken chipotle, creamy broccoli, corn, spinach or ham, or bacon and cheese.
Some of their boba teas are taro, Thai, honeydew, coconut, mango, chocolate, strawberry, banana, peach, watermelon, horchata, matcha, yogurt boba, mango jelly, coffee jelly, complete with drizzle or cheese foam.
Happy Machapy workers said the most popular boba creations for the business so far are the Thai, taro or Oreo boba teas.
“The customers here turn into friends,” Tse said. “We want our customers to be happy, content with us, be satisfied with our products, and we hope they return.”
“We don’t see them as customers, we see them as friends,” Tse said. “Here in the Valley where it is very small; we need to be friendly.”
NEKO BOBA HOUSE
For Calexico’s Neko Boba House co-owner Erika Cuevas, the motivation to open a boba tea shop in Calexico was similar for her and her business and life partner/ spouse, Melissa, as there was no specialty boba shop in Calexico, Cuevas said.
“We started – me as the chef and her as marketing – and we thought it was a good project with a purpose,” Cuevas told IVP in Spanish in an interview, “and offer the products in the best way, with a lot of different flavors, alternatives, and a bit of food.”
Cuevas, of Calexico, said Neko Boba House customers have really liked their business because of its concept – offering an Asian feel with its niche décor, and “Neko” literally meaning cat, or “characters in (Japanese) anime or manga that have catlike features” – and the shop’s yummy products.
What sets Neko Boba House apart is not only its “kawaii” (cute/tiny/ lovable) look, but its various custom-made boba creations with their own signature recipes such as the “Dear Japan” (vanilla roast, cream cheese, brown sugar, and an espresso shot) or the Matcha “Neko” Palmer, a interesting combination of Matcha (made from Japanese green tea powder) with the standard Arnold Palmer (tea and lemonade).
“Here we offer a variety of milk and other customizations free of extra charges,” Cuevas said, including 2% milk, oat, almond, coconut or organic milk.
Neko Boba House food signatures include chilaquiles, carne asada al carbon, barbacoa, and other homemade creations such as salsas, house Clamato and other. Neko Boba House also sells some seafood such as shrimp, “baby clams,” tuna and “saladitos.”
“The experience we have our customers have is, when they come here, they enjoy it and know that they’re consuming products of great quality, and they enjoy the experience,” Cuevas said. “They shouldn’t have a fear of asking us to make whatever they want to try; we’re open to the options they want.”
Customers on-hand at Neko Boba House on Wednesday said they not only enjoy boba, but enjoy Neko’s specific kinds of boba teas.
“For me it’s the different kinds of flavors,” Ekaterina “Kat” Torres, of Calexico, said while waiting to enjoy boba with her friends. “I like chewing the boba.”
“It depends on the boba, what it’s made out of,” Calexico resident Aine Carvajal said.
“When I saw they had the popping strawberry jelly I was like ‘Oo…’,” Carvajal said. “It’s just the right amount of sweet,” she said later after trying a friend’s Neko Boba House tea.
While cute and tucked away for the moment, Cuevas said she hopes her business will grow from a service window location with tables to a larger location in the future, in Calexico and in other parts of the Imperial Valley.
Happy Machapy is located at 1109 S. 4th Street, Suite B, in El Centro just westerly adjacent to Family Dollar. Neko Boba House is located at 1098 E. Cole Blvd., in Calexico, between the C-Mart gasoline station and its adjacent automated car wash.
Both boba tea shops can be found on social media: Happy Machapy at facebook.com/happymachapy and @happymachapy on Instagram, and Neko Boba House can be found at https:// bit.ly/NekoBobaHouse and @neko_boba_ house on Instagram.