BEHIND ONE BLOSSOMING BUBBLE TEA BUSINESS

By: Jamie McCormick

A KETTLE BEGINS TO WHISTLE, plaintively at first, then slowly growing more insistent, so Scot Cheng turns from his boiling pot of tapioca balls to pour up the tea. The winter rain pounding the pavement outside enhances the inviting atmosphere of repose inside Cheng’s Edgehill Village bubble tea shop, Fat Straw, as a few regular customers gather at the small, round tables for an afternoon drink.

Cheng uncaps the milk, sniffing it to check for freshness, and, counting out the exact brew time, removes the tea bag with his other hand. With the attentive precision of care and experience, he scoops in the tapioca balls, and then pours milk, tea and flavoring over them. Turning to the counter, he hands the cup to a young man. At the other end of the counter, a young girl scans the handwritten chalk menu and, with an inquisitively confused look, turns to him and asks, “Peanut butter and jelly! Is that a real flavor?” Cheng, the owner of Fat Straw, chuckles and replies, “It’s like you’re drinking the sandwich!”

Once upon a time, Scot Cheng was an aircraft engineer living in LA, unsatisfied with his job. Coming from a line of entrepreneurs—his parents owned several restaurants—he had always wanted to start a business himself. He just didn’t know what kind of business.

“I always wanted to own a business that’s really cool, something that fits me, something that I would enjoy doing,” Cheng says. And it must be mentioned that bubble tea is in his family as well. His uncle helped make bubble tea into the international phenomenon it is today, with a shop in Taiwan on the ground-floor of the industry 20-some-odd years ago. So owning a bubble tea shop seems to have been in Cheng’s stars. And once he recognized his destiny, Fat Straw was born.

Much like the Taiwanese tea cart owner of three decades ago who began putting tapioca balls into regular tea in an effort to make drinking tea more fun, Scot Cheng wanted to break into a market. He wanted to supply an interesting new product to a routine-driven clientele. A while back, the bubble tea craze proliferated throughout the West Coast, spreading from city to city through Asian popula-tions, then found its way to the large eastern cities with a similarly large Asian populace. It spread quickly, but had yet to catch on in Nashville, making our city the perfect locale from which Cheng could launch his dream. He looked around for real estate and settled on the current location in Edgehill Village, a spot surrounded by exactly the type of Nashvillians—“youngsters and hipsters”—Cheng hoped would embrace bubble tea .

Much of his clientele comes to Fat Straw to relax after classes at the many universities and high schools in the area, but the signed photos that cover the wall (you have to buy 20 drinks to be immor- talized here) span across all age groups.

So what brings people back to Fat Straw to fill up frequent-drinker punch cards and vie for a place in the photo collages? Bubble tea itself is simply unlike any other drink. As Cheng puts it, “It’s the only drink in the world that lets you sip and chew at the same time.” Plus three different styles—tea and milk, tea and fruit juice, and smoothie— and dozens of flavors, allow you to mix-and-match until you find your perfect drink. But perhaps what keeps them in the shop is the smiling face of the owner behind the counter nearly every day, serving each person his or her own personal concoction in his self-pro-claimed “old school” style.

Many vendors of bubble tea flavorings, Cheng explains, simplify the ingredients and add a tea extract to them so that the bubble tea shop only has to add hot water to the mix. But Cheng, getting a little heated, says, “To us, to the Fat Straw establishment, it’s unethical. That’s something that we just don’t do. You cannot have a bubble tea shop—a tea shop—without having tea in your store, or making tea. That’s just not right. You’re cheating the consumer.”

Not only does he brew his tea in kettles and cook the tapioca balls himself, Cheng does everything from the very first steps to the finishing touches behind an open counter so his customers can see exactly what is going into their drink. He even offers condensed milk for a richer experience and soy milk “for people who don’t do the dairy thing.” Cheng knows that the success of his shop relies on word-of-mouth advertising and that his loyalty to his customers earns their loyalty in return. And return is exactly what they do, day after day.

SCOT CHENG’S DREAM BEGAN WITH THE CONCLUSION OF ONE LIFESTYLE and a cross-country move to fashion a new lifestyle by hand. What started as a small shop with less than adequate shelving space and a small menu has blossomed into an enterprise poised to spread itself across Nashville, starting with Murfreesboro and hopefully moving to East Nashville. Fat Straw already has customers coming from these two areas who beg Cheng to bring his authentic Taiwanese treat a little bit closer to them. And Cheng, who sees the expansion as another way to satisfy his customers, intends to do just that.

He says he owes the most unique part of his business—the fact that he does everything “old school”—to his uncle, who instilled in him the value of the authenticity that brings people through the front door of Fat Straw, praising its bubble tea as the best in the country. For Cheng, nothing could be better to hear. He explains, “Yes, you’re in the business to make money, but ultimately, you’re satisfied because your customer can tell you, ‘Hey, you have the best.’ And I appreciate that. It’s worth a lot. It’s the most satisfying part.” To Scot Cheng, “Aircraft mechanic was a job,” but making people happy, even in the most simple of ways, is a life, and one worth living. ✪

www.myspace.com/fatstrawnashville

Tags: Main Street

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Main Street. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.