You walk in, glance around at the blue-sky, white-cloud interior, and sit down beside a fully-mirrored wall. Your server comes immediately and hands you two menus, one for food and the other, on luxuriously colored rice-paper, for beverages. Then you flip open the menu and do a double take.
The menu looks normal.It’s arranged just as it would be at any restaurant, into categories like beef, chicken, seafood, and noodles. But there’s a catch: this restaurant is all-vegan.
This is the Boba House, Greensboro’s newest and most surprising addition to vegetarian cuisine. Located on 332 S. Tate Street, the Boba House opened late this summer and is busy impressing the meat out of this town.
The front of the menu informs the salivating diner of the restaurant’s mission and explains the menu’s organization.
“All ingredients used in Boba House’s kitchen are soy-based products, gluten, and seasonal vegetables. Dishes are described in ways that our guests are accustomed to and NOT with the intention of creating any false impression.”
Right. The hard part’s next: deciding what to order.
There is the “Poultry in Motion” soup, fried shrimp, lemongrass chicken, garlic beef, the “Tate Street Melting Pot,” and much, much more. This is the Boba House’s one difficulty: you want it all.
After some quality menu-time, mydining companion and I finally settled on a starter and drinks, and got a wonderful surprise with their arrival.
I sipped on a steaming cup of jasmine green tea. My friend opted for the specialty the Boba House is named for, a glass of guava-flavored Boba tea ($3).
Also called bubble tea, pearl tea, or ‘zhen zhu nai cha,’ Boba tea first originated in Taiwan in the early 1980’s and features fruit juice textured with tapioca bubbles. Greensboro’s Boba House offers an extensive list of drinks, served in both juice and smoothie form. Flavors range from the expected strawberry and peach to the exotic honeydew, cantaloupe, and avocado.
After our drinks, we split an appetizer of lettuce wraps ($5.95), which the menu described as “finely chopped beef, stir-fried and mixed with carrots, cellophane noodles, shiitake mushrooms, cilantro, and mint leaves, served with fresh lettuce to wrap it all in.” We laughed at our messiness as we wrapped the stir-fry in torn lettuce leaves, dipped it in the tangy, soy-based sauce, and dropped bits of food all over the table.
We barely finished before our entres came and, with them, another pleasant surprise.
I chose a dish of crispy spring rolls with rice noodles, served cold atop a huge bowl of fresh vegetables with a fabulously tasty house dressing.
My dinner companion went for a delicious entre of “chicken” simmered in a spicy sauce of ginger, garlic, and onions. Each meal cost between $6 and $6.50, a small price for the incredible quality of food.
All of the Boba House’s dishes are reasonable, ranging from an extensive list of soups and salads for $3.50, to Paradise Island “Beef,” the most expensive dish, at $10.50. Daily lunch specials are offered between 11 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. on weekdays and feature a choice of entre, salad, and spring roll for $5.50.
This is the best new restaurant in Greensboro, and the back of the menu poses the all-important question: Have you had your Boba today?