Tealive — Restaurant in Ottawa

UPDATE: I’d like to note that the following statement in quotes is this business’s original reply. Tealive being so petty about their beef with Chatime is hilarious and for that alone I don’t have respect for this business. For the record, my friend had gone to the pick up counter more than once to check on the status of her drinks. Aside from this experience, my friend had gone to pick up a bubble tea for my birthday in December and had to wait 45 minutes, so my original review was written after a second bad experience.

“Hi Yoshuna. Our wait time today, after order is placed and even it being very busy with our BOGO special, is no more than 15 minutes. Are you confusing us with another BBT down the street?”

They then changed their response to: “Hi Yoshuna. We've had no complaints about long wait times today, but with BOGO this weekend, we've been busy and wait times may be longer than normal but if you ever feel like you've been waiting too long please notify one of our tearistas rather than waiting an hour, incase your order was somehow missed. †Update: There was an issue with the label printers today and a couple of orders didn't print so it did take a little longer before our staff picked up on that. If your order came in during that time, it would have taken longer than usual. Our sincere apologies for that.”

My original review: Really disorganized. People who ordered after my friend got their drinks before her (even groups of 5+ people). My friend waited over an hour for her drinks, and there was a couple that had been waiting...

We visited Tealive on opening day and tried the special Aren Palm flavoured drinks. They're tasty but only subtly different than standard milk tea. We've come back on several occasions, mostly late at night since it's one of the few places open past 10pm, and we get juice/fruit tea or basic milk teas. They make those pretty consistently.

We do not recommend the brown/black sugar pearl milk beverages nor any of the slush or frappé-type drinks as they come out chalky/powdery and overall really weird... The slushes are almost like you have a cup of crushed iced with some cream or fruity drink poured over it (rather than smoothly blended). And I don't mean it's like shaved ice either, so don't get your hopes up 😂.

For food, the popcorn chicken was improved over the last couple of months. It's now closer to Taiwanese-style and less like meh Burger King lol, so we're happy with that (and we recognize the limitations of frozen snacks). The cream bolo bao are a hard pass unless you absolutely need something doughy/creamy. The topping is not light /crispy nor is the bun super soft/fluffy like typical Asian buns. Never tried the macarons or cake cups as they do not look worth it 😅... For specialty desserts such as those, we'd rather go directly to DAO. And finally, for the toasties! They are a welcome "unique" item for the forsaken Ottawa food scene so we enjoy them once in a while. Can't go wrong with a little snack-sized sandwich packed with cheese, lettuce, tomato,...

To whoever the owner is,

Your tea was simply bad. The milk tea was just water. The macarons tasted like creamcheese. As per the one star reviews to other business i’ve made. Not that many compared to the number of 5 star reviews i put out, it’s applebees. They don’t deserve more. Since you decided to look into my comments i decided to look into yours. Honestly am a little shocked at how you react to poor reviews. Maybe making changes to your business according to peoples taste rather then qualifying any bad comment as fake. People can enjoy their time at your establishment without enjoying your food. They can be mutually exclusive. Just because one person in a group of people friends disliked their purchases and the rest of the friends group enjoyed theirs, doesn’t mean the review is fake. Also incredibly creepy how you looked up the camera feed of the exact time and date and judged that the review was fake. I can keep typing, but the current 3.7 stars your place has is reflective of what people think of your restaurant. This isn’t my fault, it’s yours. Plenty of restaurant in ottawa perform well and have the reviews to prove it. Tealive is not one them. The staff was great, but i didn’t go there for your staff. I went there for tea and was pretty dissapointed.

I hope that...