Koi D Bar (near Downtown Salt Lake City, Utah) was the first bubble tea place I tried in Salt Lake, and our experience here was not great. The store was clean and extremely popular (but it was near downtown which is understandable) but my bubble tea just didn't stack up with the rest of the competition. My tea was extra sweet and they also didn't have tapioca pearls here, so I had to get popping lychee again. Of course, the popping boba had already popped in the tea before you could drink it and made the drink taste like lychee. This place was slightly better than Boise but I still wouldn't recommend it. I would blame these bad experiences slightly on the awful heat and the boba shortage of 2021, which sort of ruined bubble tea places during this time.
Urban Fox (Meridian, Idaho, suburb of Boise) was one of my least favorite bubble tea places. My tea that I had ordered had tea that tasted like you let Lucky Charms cereal mix with milk for 2 hours and then just drank the milk. The color also had looked like you dumped a whole bunch of those blue Lucky Charms marshmellows and mixed it with milk. During the time we had gone there, one of the only boba options was Popping Lychee which had popped in the tea before you even got to drink it. This made the drink taste like Lucky Charms cereal mixed with Lychee jellies, that had been watered down with the ice that had been added to the drink. I would have to say that the store had a very nice interiror and that the staff were kind. Maybe this is biased because of the heat and the boba shortage, so I bumped the review up to 2 boba pearls.
We just went to QQ Li's Chinese Cuisine in the Viking's Plaza (near the college) in Bellingham, Washington and the first impressions of this place wasn't that good. They had a sort of run down place but it was right next to the college, and because of Bellingham's many colleges, it makes it a college town. Many students can't afford expensive food so the Vikings Plaza serves cheap Chinese food, Mexican food, pizza and more. But, the quality of the food isn't the greatest so you can expect to pay a lower price for lower quality food. This makes this boba place a meh place, its good for cheaper boba and you get a lot of boba pearls in it, but the restraunt is sort of run down and the tea is okay. It is not the greatest bubble tea but its not awful, so I definitely rate this place 5 boba pearls. (it doesnt have the traditional boba seal btw!)