24 Apr Please The Palate Pick of the Week: Tasty Tea Drinks at Sunright Tea Studio on Sawtelle

Now that life is starting to get back to a sense of normalcy, I took a walk to Sawtelle Blvd this week. The normally bustling street filled with restaurants had been quiet over the last year but the energy seems to be coming back. There were many people on the street, all masked and respecting social distancing, lining up to order food from one of the many restaurants. I wandered across Olympic Blvd to check out the new Sunright Tea Studio that just opened up. Bright and sunny, serving up a selection of tea drinks, the Sunright Tea Studio is the Please The Palate pick of the week.

The Sunright Tea Studio opened on Sawtelle in West LA at the beginning of April, with a second location that opened the same day in Little Tokyo in Downtown Los Angeles. But, the company was established in Southern California in 2019 and today has ten locations in Southern California and one location in Northern California.

Sunright Tea Studio unites traditional Taiwanese flavors and current SoCal trends by serving boba, taro and matcha mixed with ingredients like Oreos. The tea leaves are sourced from mountaintop farms where they are picked fresh and fermented. The tea is then blended with other natural tea varietals based on origin, weather, and season, resulting in beautifully balanced and consistent flavor. The same care put into the quality of the tea is applied to other ingredients and Sunright sources ingredients from top purveyors in Asia and California. For example, the boba, which is made of tapioca, is shipped uncooked directly from Taiwan, along with their own brown sugar. The pretty pearl-shaped boba is simmered, then cooled with water, then simmered again with brown sugar until it reaches the perfect consistency. Sunright prepares boba fresh all throughout the day at each location.

Sunright has a menu of high-quality teas and creative specialty beverages. And, with a bright and happy ethos, it put a smile on my face as I waited for my turn to order my drinks.

Original flavor pairings combine traditional teas (Ceylon black tea, jasmine green tea, roasted oolong, and special oolong varietal called Four Seasons) with unique ingredients, such as Oreos, red bean, fresh taro, lychee jelly, cheese foam, crème brûlée, brown sugar, grass jelly, pudding, boba, agar boba, and honey boba. And there are many different drinks to choose from, including Boba Milk, Cheese Foam, Frosties, Coffee, The Right Milk Tea, Sunny Fruit Tea, Original Tea, and Brûlée Lattes with Oat Milk.

Sunny Fruit Tea

The Sunny Fruit Tea collection blends fresh fruit with tea. The Strawberry Jasmine Tea is made of fresh strawberries blended with jasmine green tea. I loved the clean and fresh flavor of this tea which has pieces of fresh strawberries mixed in the tea. Other fruit tea flavors include Lemon Jasmine Tea and Grapefruit Jasmin Tea, or there is Yogurt Green Tea, Yogurt Lemon, and Yogurt Orange which are topped with yogurt to add a tart flavor.

The Right Milk Tea

The Right Milk Tea collection starts with a tea and cream base and then eclectic ingredients are added. There are thirteen unique flavors in this signature collection and I ordered the customer favorite Sunright Boba Milk Tea.  The Sunright Boba Milk Tea is made with a Ceylon tea base, brown sugar, and boba. When you order the drink, you can request it to be more or less sweet but if you order this without adjusting the sweetness, you will find that it just right.

Sunright Boba Milk

Sunright Boba Milk is like a milk tea, but without the tea and the collection offers tasty combinations. I could not resist the Oreo Brûlée Boba Milk made of a crème brûlée foam and crushed Oreos combined with sweetened fresh milk and boba. I selected this one to be 75% sweet and really enjoyed it.

One of my favorite elements at Sunright Tea Studio is the closures on the drinks. They have a machine that seals the cup so that you can turn the drink over and it does not leak. This means you can easily follow the Sunright Tea Studio recommendation to “Shake 17 Times” to mix up all the ingredients. And, when you are ready to drink, just puncture a hole with the straw and you are set.