Downtown | Arts & Culture | Ninth Square | Youth Arts Journalism Initiative | Culinary Arts
Alex Lopes Photo.
The sweet sugary scent of dessert overwhelms you as you step into BanTang Crêpe.
Tucked inside the cozy Vietnamese-Thai restaurant, Pho Thai, in the heart of the Ninth Square, the Japanese-style boba tea shop specializes in sweet and savory crêpes. But that’s not the limit of the fun food you can consume at BanTang.
Katie Harper, 16, is a regular at BanTang who started popping into the shop this past spring. The shop is within walking distance for the dual-enrolled High School in the Community and Gateway Community College student.
Her go-to order is the brown sugar boba tea, which she said is rich in flavor and has a smooth milky texture.
While she said she prefers to stick with the brown sugar boba tea because it's familiar and hits her sweet spot, she does occasionally like to try other flavors.
Her favorite part of stopping in at BanTang Crêpe for a boba tea? Piercing the taut, thin plastic seal that covers the sweet drink with a boba straw.
Boba straws typically have larger openings to accommodate the tasty, chewy, black tapioca pearls; they tend to have a sharpened point on one end specifically for piercing the seal. Often, there are cute designs such as smiley faces on the seal of every boba drink.
The tea-based drink with the tapioca pearls—the small edible orbs typically made of starch extracted from the cassava root—vary from $6.50 to $7 at BanTang Crêpe.
Boba tea, also known as bubble tea, is widely believed to have originated in Taiwan in the 1980s and made its way to the United States a decade later. Today, the drink is as ubiquitous as ramen, tacos and poké bowls. New Haven boasts four other boba shops and several restaurants that also offer it.
If boba isn’t your jam, fruit slushies, fresh fruit tea, and Japanese snacks known as Pocky sticks are all possible for you to consume at BanTang. And if you have more than a sweet tooth, BanTang offers savory crêpes that can come with a variety of fillings including chicken teriyaki or smoked salmon with vegetables all wrapped into a warm fluffy Japanese-street style crêpe, which is wrapped for on the go eating.
Though the filling is savory, the actual crêpe is made of sugar and vanilla batter. It melts into your mouth making it a quick easy meal priced at $12-$13.
BanTang does offer dessert-style sweet crêpes, many of which are filled with fresh fruit and a sweet spread inside. Strawberries, mango, and banana are some of the highlighted sweet filling, with delicious spreads in flavors like chocolate and banana.The sweet crêpes are priced at $9-$12.
This piece comes to the Arts Paper through the fifth annual Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI), a program of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. Read more about the program here or by checking out the "YAJI" tag. Alex Lopes is a rising junior at High School in the Community.