Boba Guys Potrero — Restaurant in San Francisco

There's nothing I blithely tolerate more than businesses which occupy the bottom floor of some grim new apartment complex. The windows on the ground floor are always too tall and I'm caught staring at my reflection more times than I care to count. And as much as the easy access to a Good or Service holds an appeal, there is an unbridled discomfort in being physically beneath four to seven people who are willing to pay three times your rent for something that's an equivalent size to your apartment. I hope the CalTrain never lets them rest.

Time disappears inside this store. No matter where or when I place my order, it's always on the counter. I have ordered Brown Sugar Milk Tea from the 22 bus as it careens down the one block separating me and a bucket of tapioca pearls. Time to order 7-9 minutes. Yet there it is, nestled in its special and separate location on their counter, a foot away from the sign that delineates where orders placed on Uber Eats et al. will be.

There is always someone beautiful and younger than me working there, usually huddled in conversation with someone else beautiful who also works there. As I walk in to pick up my order, which I'm retrieving on the twelve minute break between discussing Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic and a documentary following the last years of her life when she lived in Berlin, they stop their briefly gorgeous conversation to say "Hi! Welcome in" before immediately resuming. As I walk out the store, the flaccid paper wrapper of my straw failing to enter the overfull trashcan at the entrance / exit of the store, they give another brief cheer goodbye. "Thank you!" I feel too embarrassed to go back and pick up my trash off the ground. I'm usually greeted by some awful gust of wind down 16th street, destroying whatever poise my outfit might have had when I left the house. At least I have this perfectly chewable made to order sugar rush of delicate tea leaves, drenched in the beauty of all this...

I went here with some friends for a sweet treat after brunch one day. It was my first time at this location and right from the get go the ambiance felt both new and familiar at the same time. I'm not sure if all Boba Guys have changed their menu lately, but (at least since the last time I've been to one) this one definitely had some flavours that I hadn't seen at BG before. I guess their special or seasonal...? I ended up getting the iced matcha caramel latte with boba. Others in the group got the matcha strawberry, orange glow, hong kong style milk tea, etc. The drinks were good all around! The caramel drink started off as super sweet at first (since all the caramel sank to the bottom), but then got watered down as the ice melted (expectedly). Otherwise, the only downside is that the card reader was iffy (this location is cashless) and kept...

2-star review in Jan 2023: Hong Kong style milk tea is definitely no longer good -- not smooth nor taste authentic by any means. No sweetness adjustment which is fine, but it isn't authentic since authentic HK milk tea would be very sweet. This is like maybe 25% sweet relative to original. And since sweetness cannot be adjust, I can only assume that this is one of those powder/pouch-made HK milk tea.

4-star review in 2019: The sweetness level of your drink is highly dependent on the person who make your drink. In other words, it may not be consistent as it should. I usually order my drinks half (50%) sweet, but there are couple occasions where the drink has absolutely no sweetness to it. I did ask them to adjust the sweetness for me, but I would actually rather ask the exact same person to remake the drink with a different...