Ten Ren’s Tea Time (Toronto) – Good if you love tea flavoured food
Go for Tea is my usual place for late night bubble-tea and crushed ice but a buddy of mine brought me to Ten Ren’s Tea Time as an alternative and I was pleasantly surprised. It isn’t quite as pretentious as Go for Tea and the crowd is quieter. They have a fairly impressive stash of tea and it is displayed beautifully (I love shelves lit from below). I didn’t get a chance to try it (as I had another agenda).
This is the Fresh mango crushed ice for $7.99. Look at all that condensed milk.
As you can see, the ice is more of a powdery quality instead of a slushy quality. It reminds me of snow. I really really liked the texture. My only problem is that the toppings were brutally sweet. The mango didn’t quite taste particularly fresh either.
The unique thing about Ten Ren’s is that they serve lots of food that is tea-flavoured. This is the Fried Fresh Green Tea Chicken Wings ($6.99 or half off if you order a drink between 230pm and 530pm or 10pm and 1am). They were wonderfully juicy, crispy, and seasoned. The green tea really added more to the crunch than impart any noticeable green tea flavour.
Overall, Ten Ren’s Tea Time is a nice alternative to Go for Tea. I am not sure which I prefer more but I do like certain things in both. In my comparison of crushed ice… I liked the ice texture more at Ten Ren’s but I liked the toppings better at Go for Tea.
Ten Ren’s Tea Time, 111 Times Ave, Markham, ON, (905) 881-8896, www.tenren.com
That mound of mangos over crushed ice looks massive! It reminded me of a giant sized version of a caramel covered sunday from my youth.
Interesting to hear about some green tea-added deep fried wings, but as you noted, I can’t imagine it imparting any flavour. I don’t think I’ve seen this at any of the Taiwanese places serving a similar wing dish out here in the west.
Yea it was pretty damn tasty. It was a bit sweet but I was able to tolerate it. Unfortunately, I haven’t really seen any shaved ice out in Calgary. Maybe Vancouver has more options with a larger Taiwanese population?
Did a search for Ten Ren… this is actually on the second page of Google’s search results… nice!