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Photos by Bill Straus
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Photos by Bill Straus
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Photos by Bill Straus
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Photos by Bill Straus
Honnah Lee Bubble Tea, Lexington’s first business completely dedicated to the Taiwanese specialty drink, is slated to open its second location this month in the Chevy Chase location that most recently housed Montea.
Created as a post-school snack for children in Taiwan during the 1980s, bubble tea has slowly infiltrated other cultures in recent years. Co-owners Mick and Deb Shambro opened their first bubble tea storefront seven years ago after discovering the unique treat at an arts festival in Paducah.
“It was really, really hot so I asked my husband to get me an iced tea,” Deb remembered. “He came back with this thing and said they didn’t have iced tea.”
As it turns out, the drink Mick had bought for his wife was a peach bubble tea. After just a few sips, Deb was sold.
“I think I had about five of them that day,” she said with a laugh.
At the time, she worked for Bluegrass Community and Technical College as the director of Information Technology and was considering retiring.
“I thought if I could figure out how to make it, people around here would really like it,” she explained.
Bubble tea, according to Deb, is best described as being halfway between a slushy and a smoothie.
“The simplest way to describe it is that it’s like a smoothie, but it has jasmine green tea so it’s a little lighter than that,” she said. “You can have ice blended in to the ingredients like a smoothie or have all the ingredients poured over ice – that version is called milk tea.”
Both versions of bubble tea feature the uniqueness of fruit “boba” – small, pearl-sized tapioca balls – in the bottom, which lend a unique chewy texture to the beverage.
After nearly six months of trial and error, Deb finally perfected her own bubble tea recipe, adding a “bubble tea” concept in 2010 to the bookstore and art gallery that the couple had opened the year before, Shambro La Art and Books (the store was on West Maxwell Street).
Shortly after they began selling the sweet drink, Mick and Deb set up a booth at a Fourth of July event downtown and were completely overwhelmed by the response to their bubble tea. They closed the bookstore in 2014, opening the original Honnah Lee Bubble Tea location on Harrodsburg Road the following year, after several people had asked them to start selling the refreshing treat again.
Three years later, they will expand to a second location, in the former Euclid Avenue home of Montea, which was Lexington’s only retail tea shop before it closed. Montea will continue selling its beloved teas through an online retail operation.
The Shambros were particularly interested in the Chevy Chase area because of its proximity to University of Kentucky’s campus and nearby schools, which they hope will provide a lot of additional foot traffic.
“It has a reputation for being a tightknit little area where everything is local and eclectic,” said Deb of the popular area.
Similar to the Harrodsburg Road location, the new shop will boast a menu of more than 30 bubble tea flavors, an assortment of Asian snacks and candies, and Deb’s homemade gourmet popsicles. The Shambros are hopeful that the Chevy Chase location, which they plan to open by mid-September at the latest, will have the sort of ambiance the couple has been searching for since opening their first store in 2009.
“It was almost like fate that Montea decided to go online only,” Deb said. “It seemed like it was meant to be somehow.”