Hechalou Tea Beaverton — Restaurant in Beaverton

this place was a bit far from where i live but it was so worth the drive!! the drinks are priced reasonably, the store was nice and clean, and there were a lot of parking spots outside the store!

the guy at the register was super nice and accommodating and answered all my questions despite it being so busy which i love because i’ve unfortunately havent been seeing a lot of good customer service at boba shops these days! it’s so nice to see someone actually enjoy their job!

i bought a total of 5 drinks and a bubble waffle for ~ $35!

osmanthus oolong w/ almond jelly 30% sweet : i LOVED how well the almond jelly goes with the oolong, and i think it is the perfect sweetness! it was still a little bit on the sweeter side so i think next time i will try 10%. from my experiences this oolong seemed a bit stronger and had a more forward taste than other osmanthus oolong teas i’ve tried but i think the forward taste really paired so well with the almond jelly! i’ll def be back to get this

house blend milk tea w/ sesame jelly 50% sweet : i absolutely loved the black sesame jelly, there’s a sort of graininess to it which i really enjoyed. the tea was strong enough where u can still taste it and i think it was a super perfect balance, although at 50% it was still too sweet for me especially with the black sesame jelly.

magnolia lime green tea 50% sweet : not really my thing unfortunately! :( i liked the flavor but i feel like it tasted bitter — they added lime slices to it and i think the bitterness from the lime skin is where im getting that bitter aftertaste, to where i can’t really taste the green tea :( the sweetness was good and balanced! i wouldn’t get this personally but if i did i’d ask for the lime slices to be taken out

matcha latte with matcha jelly 50% sweet : i’m a huge matcha fan but unfortunately this matcha didn’t taste as authentic as i would like but i’m not completely surprised as it tastes more like a ‘matcha milk tea’ you’d get at a boba shop rather than a tea house. it had a grainy texture and it was personally too sweet for me ! it didn’t have much of the ‘grassy’ taste you’d expect in matcha. although i really liked the matcha jelly, i think the graininess and the ‘matcha milk tea’ taste in the jelly made it taste good, and i’d probably put it as a topping in a different milk tea!

original bubble waffle : it was good! i don’t have much to say as it just tastes like a standard bubble waffle you’d get at a boba shop.

overall i think this place has a lot of good drink options with super nice workers 🥹🥹 the osmanthus tea with almond jelly was my personal favorite and is making this place one of my favorite spots next to bubble n tea — i’ll definitely be back to try more :3

edit : i went again recently and unfortunately i feel like they lost their quality :( drinks with no ice are kind of warm and not mixed all the way, which would make sense because it’s no ice but the past drinks i got with no ice were definitely colder

another thing is that i ordered an osmanthus oolong tea with no toppings and they just added the sugar and the tea and didn’t stir it, and it was super hard for me to stir it with the straw since a lot of it was stuck at the bottom crevice of the cup. it wasn’t busy at all so i would’ve liked it if they took the extra time to stir my drink :’c

unfortunately i also feel like they lost their sense of customer service aswell — i just can’t see myself driving back here...

The drinks were pretty good but the experience was terrible. I can understand this was a soft opening so want to give the employees some grace- but the owner/management team was out of their depth.

As customers were queuing for an hour outside, the gentleman who appeared to be the owner was pacing around slowly doing nothing. Several occasions he came out taking pictures of the queue with a big grin. I’m happy for him and the huge lines that turned up, but seriously?!

The owner didn’t bother to hand out any menus in advance to the dozens of people in the queue so people could start choosing their drinks. A sensible owner would probably have prepared some small samples drinks or even plain water to hand out in the line to keep folks from dehydrating-nothing. He could have also helped at the back preparing drinks which appeared to be the main bottleneck. There’s no excuse for how long the drink preparation took- we waited about 80 minutes with 15 orders ahead of us.

Instead I watched the owner loiter around arms crossed no sense of urgency, and the management team carrying around a laptop looking at what appeared to be order volume stats and analytics while the clearly very junior staff were making drinks at glacial speed.

The whole experience took us over 2 hours and I won’t be back...

Came during the soft launch on May 24th. Waited over two hours for drinks and all of them had completely melted ice with a missing drink The opening was super disorganized with numbers called out of order Drinks were all piled up on the counter with no organization whatsoever Ran out of stock of toppings after dozens of people ordered drinks containing that item

Granted this was the soft opening, I would just wait a few more months until they figure things out. However, the waiting times on drinks and the lack of urgency from the dozens of baristas was extremely frustrating among many customers.

My constructive criticism includes spending extra time on training so that workers can have recipes memorized and organizing orders better. Also, putting out drinks together in terms of order number—AFTER it is complete—makes it so much easier for customer and worker to find drinks. It also is less overwhelming instead of throwing out every completed drink on the counter.

The drinks themselves were not bad but I do not think that any drink is worth hours of waiting. I hope that this place will reach out to other boba establishments in the area or higher management for criticism. I believe that they’ll get better in the...