Meow Meow Cafe - West Covina

It’s friggin’ freezing. As such, this is the absolute worst time to get addicted to an ice slush drink. Yet, there we were yesterday, driving up to West Covina for the second time in a week to a barren shopping mall where no one seems to shop, to Meow Meow Café—a boba purveyor that looks like a cat-loving, Asian teen’s bedroom—just to get another fix of “the slushy stuff”.

This is not boba milk tea. In this drink, Meow Meow Café (as well as others like Half & Half) has done away with the tea as much as Apple did away with the phone part on the iPhone to make the iPod Touch. The old iPod Touch joke goes like this: they came to a point with the iPhone where there was too many extra doodads, there was no room for the phone.

The same thing happened here. There was no room for tea. If you’ve tasted the so-called milk teas at Tapioca Express and Lollicup, you’d know there was barely any tea flavor there to begin with. This drink takes away the pretense that tea was anything anybody actually wanted.

There is the chewy, choking-hazard of boba. There is wiggly milk pudding. There is some sort of slush. There is milk. And in this drink, there is also sauce.

Yes, sauce.

Drizzled over the top of the slushy mound is a dark concoction made from brown sugar that snakes its way through the milky layers like a creeping oil leak. When you’re ready, you move your oversized straw in a churning motion through the hole in the lid to mix the sauce so that it incorporates into the slush.

The brown sugar flavor reminds my fellow addict of her childhood and particularly of the Filipino drink called sago gulaman. Me, I just like the deep resonating sweetness it adds to the slush that without it would’ve been kind of insipid.

We left Meow Meow Café with our body shivering more than ever and our teeth chattering, “T-t-t-that was a g-g-g-good i-d-d-d-d-dea!”

Meow Meow Cafe
3646 Nogales St., Ste. A
West Covina, CA 91792
(626) 965-9789

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