TP TEA – San Mateo — Restaurant in San Mateo

Update 1/9/2023: They stopped serving their drinks hot for Tie Guan Yin. Hot version is way better on a cold day so we’ve stopping going here

Update 11/16/2022: machine still broken?! Lol

Update 10/17/2022: unable to buy hot drinks right now. The machine to make their hot drinks is currently broken and as been broke for a week. I really liked their hot Tie Guan Yin over cold. :/

Update 9/22: got the Treasure Taro Milk Tea with 30% sugar. Tasted the taro but not the tea for me. Friend said she tasted the tea.

Preference: Tie Guan Yin over the Taro

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New boba place in San Mateo. Soft opening so staff are still in training— keep that in mind. We ordered the Tie Guan Yin Milk Tea. Noticed once it was made that it was just the Tie Guan Yin Tea — the manager/trainer noticed the confusion and offered to make the milk tea version without charge so we got to try both the tea and milk tea version. Both with boba, hot, and 30% sugar.

Tea version is very flavorful. Milk version is sweet given the milk but you can taste the tea which i liked. Both are good since I liked the tea alot.

They have 3 versions of the Tie Guan Yin which I think where the initial confusion came from. The third version is the latte.

I’d recommend the owners put numbers next to each version to reduce confusion like A1 vs B1!

Overall, good interaction with staff on their first weekend and I will come again to...

We had ordered 6 drinks and 3 waffles (in 2 separate orders) and had been waiting around ten minutes before asking if our order was ready. We saw a few drinks that looked like ours, but the girl up front said it was a different order/ours was still being made and packed those drinks in a separate bag and put them behind her.

We proceeded to wait for another 15 minutes and asked again. As it turns out those first drinks she packed away were in fact ours and the other three were separated on the front counter, making it seem like our order wasn't done, I guess. The waffles we ordered were also packed away sitting in the back. They seem to use an electronic number display board but it's not at all accurate. I saw countless people walk up to the counter and have to ask if their order was ready. We waited so long that our waffles and hot drinks were basically cold.

This could have easily been avoided if the person up front would just call out order numbers? It just seemed really inefficient and unorganized. Instead, they had like at least 20+ drinks sitting on the front counter and people would have to walk up and ask. I didn't even receive a text notification that my order was ready until about 20 minutes after I had...

I usually go to the TP Tea in Cupertino but since I stopped by San Mateo, I decided to order a couple drinks here for pickup. Because it was a pickup order, everything was already paid for and the app should have shown if any ingredient was not available. But when I arrived for pickup, one of the drinks that I ordered with almond jelly was sealed with a note saying “sorry, out of jelly”. So I asked the guy if I could be refunded if they’re out of jelly. There was a bit of back and forth but it sounded like they don’t do refunds. I was kind of annoyed that they were trying to send me off with an incomplete drink when I had already paid for the add-on.. but after a bit they said they can remake with a different topping so I guess that part was redeemed. They were nice about it too. I also ordered another drink with Crystal boba… which I only noticed after I left that there was barely any crystal boba added. The Cupertino location gives me enough so that every sip has 2-3 crystal bobas. But this one from San Mateo location gave me probably 15-20 bobas total so I was searching for the boba from sip 1. Really. Not exaggerating. With both drinks somewhat incomplete, I don’t think I will be returning to...