Shanghai's Lelecha Stuffs Viva Mall With Excellent Strawberry Cheese Tea and Colorful Bread
The cheese tea trend has yet to peak, what with the lines in front of popular venues still running long. Though it seems most brands are from Guangdong and Taiwan, a Shanghai venture has finally joined the battle for the cheesy crown.
Founded at the end of 2016, Lelecha specializes in cheese tea and Taiwanese-style bread and proved extremely popular, opening over 20 outlets in Shanghai in one year. To feed Beijing's insatiable need for the thick white froth, Lelecha has touched down in the capital with their Viva Mall, Shuangjing.
The venue has no seating area but it does, however, have a busy counter where customers patiently queue up to order their takeaway drinks. There's also a display case for bread and an in-house bakery in the back. They offer soft baked bread (RMB 15-28) with a Shanghainese twist, such as laba bread, which is stuffed with porridge (腊八粥 làbāzhōu), featuring rice, glutinous rice, lotus seed, peanut, red beans, barley, dates, all seasoned with sugar. The purple rice bread (RMB 16) contains a similarly heavy mix of purple rice and walnuts and although lacking a strong nutty flavor, the soft and stretchy surface is a nice match for the slightly acidic filling.
The xiandan chaoren (RMB 15), literally "salted egg superman," couldn’t be more Chinese. Covered with a yellow salted egg yolk crust and stuffed with pork floss, the bread is both fluffy and slightly crunchy, making for a combination that may take a little bit of getting used to but is likely to overpower your initial instincts eventually. One downside is that we found it to be too oily, meaning that the complimentary disposable gloves definitely came in handy.
As for the drinks, they only offer different kinds of cheese tea. The sizable strawberry cheese tea (RMB 24) was utterly delicious courtesy of a fresh strawberry smoothie base topped with a mixture of cheese, whipped cream, milk, and Himalayan salt. Its pomegranate red made the whole thing pop, and the layer of cheese was so thick that we were tempted to drop a coin into it to see if it would levitate.
The venue itself couldn’t be more joyful, with its assortment colorful bread stacked by the counter, pop songs blaring from speakers, and peppy and friendly staff milling about. Grating as some of those elements can be, the decent range of sugary bread and some of the best tea we've found thus far makes Lelecha safe from drowning in the growing seas of the cheese tea trend.
Lelecha
Daily 11am-10pm. 101, 1/F, Viva Mall, Dongsanhuan Zhonglu, Chaoyang District (156 1812 9631)
乐乐茶：朝阳区东三环中路富力广场一层101
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Photos: Tracy Wang
