I’d had bad tapioca experiences: My first drink tasted heavily of bitter tea, and countless times I was left with a disproportionate amount of sticky tapioca sitting at the bottom of my cup when I’d finished all of the drink. On top of that, a friend warned me to stay away from the calorie-adding starchy boba pearls. But I decided to put all of that behind me and start out with a fresh slate (or, I guess you could say—fresh palate).

Quickly

Prior to entering Quickly, or what I like to call the Starbucks of tapioca — 10 franchises in San Francisco alone — I was famished because I spent all day cramming for a test and had only consumed a small square of blueberry coffee cake that morning on my MUNI ride to school. After studying their bright orange wall-to-wall menu and tempting pictures of Taiwanese-style snacks, I ordered popcorn chicken, fried tempura, curry covered fish balls and a strawberry milk tea tapioca.

While waiting, I decided that I liked the place’s bright and bubbly atmosphere — from the cute, high navy blue chairs to the three large television screens blaring Chinese music video clips and Quickly promos. But after I tasted my tapioca drink, which came in a slightly unattractive mauve-pink color, I realized that I had made a mistake. If I were a tea-lover, I would have enjoyed the slightly sweet strawberry taste of the drink with the strong underlying tea flavor. But I like my drinks the way I like my coffee — as sweet as possible. Although the boba pearls were very soft and had a nice chewy quality, the drink as a whole tasted a bit flavorless. Ultimately, I thought the drink was okay and I ended up polishing it off to quench my thirst from their salty (but well-made) snacks.

Wonderful Foods Co

I’ve always loved the kid-in-a-candy-store atmosphere of Wonderful Foods Co, with its large clear help-yourself boxes of colorful gummy bears, sugary peach rings, pastel mint-chocolate balls and other sweets. Though right next door to a Quickly franchise, the two are almost polar opposites. Opting for a more homey, quiet feel, the walls are bare (aside from the Polaroid pictures tacked up near the cash register that make customers aware of it’s being a family-owned business).

A big difference between this place and Quickly is that while Quickly has a flyer for tea eggs plastered on the wall, Wonderful Foods Co has the real thing right in front of the paying customer’s nose in a large steaming pot.

Their drink was different as well — their strawberry tapioca (no tea, this time) was a bright, rosy pink with bigger, chewier and more plentiful boba pearls. Wonderful Foods Co’s tapioca pearls tasted a lot better than Quickly’s boba — they seemed to last longer and it had a lingering honey aftertaste while still being soft, but the drink itself needed more work. I enjoyed the incredible sugary sweetness that satisfied my taste buds on my first sip, but by the time I was half through, I started feeling that it was too sweet and that the milky strawberry flavor turned into a liquid-bubble-gum taste.

Yoogo Gelato

At the border of Chinatown and Nob Hill, Yoogo Gelato advertises a fusion of Italian, American and Asian flavors with their colorful whipped gelato ice-cream, heavenly-smelling crepes and icy tapioca drinks. As I waited for my strawberry tapioca, I admired a pretty display of gelato flavors and appreciated the place’s overall design. After my first sip of the ripe-watermelon-pink drink, I knew which tapioca store’s drink was my favorite. I felt like Goldilocks — after tasting Quickly’s tea-infused, soft tapioca and Wonderful Food Co’s syrupy, chewy tapioca — I’d found a near-perfect medium.

Yoogo Gelato’s tapioca was just right for me: from the drink’s fruity splash of sweet strawberry flavor tinged with tartness, to its soft, chewy, honey-tasting boba pearls. It was just as it was advertised: made fresh and served fresh.