Boba Bear Releases Om Ali Topped With Tapioca Pearls

My beloved SceneEats readers, it’s your favourite foodie (although I’m not sure if I’m allowed to call myself that without an avid Tik Tok account in which I scream-narrate my culinary expeditions into your ears) Fatafeet El-Share’.

As my grandma-sponsored Ramadan food comas faded away, gradually allowing me more and more conscious time, I got to do more of my all-time favourite activity: scrolling! Let the black turtleneck clad sceptics say what they want about short-form content, the truth is that it’s filled with pleasant as well as not-so-pleasant (Remember the konafa burger?) surprises. On this particularly stale Ramadan day, I came across something that jolted me upright from my afternoon couch sprawl - Boba Om Ali.

With my mind racing in a billion different directions (some admittedly not dessert-related), I posed the question, what does one wear to a boba om ali date?. A few hours later, flinging my bedazzled kaftan out the door post-Iftar, we were face to face with the breadth of the situation at New Cairo’s Boba Bear.

After about 10 minutes of questioning everything we stand for, we reached a fun conclusion that propelled us through a leap of faith into the bubbly embrace of the tea shop; this dish has as dishevelled an identity as we do. We jumped.

Promptly after, we were digging our spoons into an aromatic Om Ali topped with its very own (Cartier) set of tapioca pearls. Expectations forced out of our heads, we let the first spoonful envelop us in an adventure of tastes. The second one followed swiftly after. It wasn’t long before we’d wolfed down the whole thing. No regrets.

The only way to describe Boba Om Ali is that it’s off-putting in the way that prevents you from ever letting it go – like an accident you can’t take your eyes off of or a particularly hard-to-leave situationship. The brown sugar boba perfectly compliments the unfaltering creaminess of the Om Ali, so, despite the slightly squeamish texture clash, I could not hold myself back. I’m still in disbelief. And I’ll probably be coming back for more.

Lost but sending love,

Fatafeet El-Share’