Nayuri: Yet Another Popular Taiwanese-Style Cheese Tea Bakery Tries Its Luck in Beijing
Founded in Shenzhen, Nayuri opened its first branch in 2009, three years earlier than the now mega-popular HeyTea. Seeing the latter brand's success in Beijing, Nayuri has hedged its bets and expanded its way to Xidan, one of the busiest shopping areas in the city.
Located on the third floor of Joy City, Nayuri is easy to find: simply look for a long line on account of their popular Taiwanese-style drinks, bread, and pastries. The spacious venue actually consists of three areas: one for picking up bread, one for ordering drinks, and one for sitting down (or just playing on your phone, as the picture above attests to).
The bread (RMB 16-28) is colorful, comes in lots of different whacky shapes, and is stuffed with ingredients like matcha, red bean, chocolate, yam, sweet potato, brown sugar, and pork floss – as you'd expect from a Taiwanese-style bakery. The drinks (RMB 17-32) include fruit teas, cheese teas, and straight teas for the faint of heart.
The signature Supreme Milk Strawberry (RMB 32) took time to make but we were kept enthralled by the close to 10 staff running around behind the bar trying to keep up with the orders. The result tasted something akin to a strawberry sundae smoothie topped with savory cheese and a hint of tea. The pieces of juicy and real strawberry testified to the use of fresh, quality ingredients, and went down extremely well with the thick and foamy cheese on top.
Given that we were told they had run out of Golden Mountain tea, a mix of Darjeeling and black tea from India and Taiwan, 10 minutes after ordering, we had to wait another painful 15 minutes for a replacement pu’er tea with cheese top (RMB 28). Worth the wait? The tea proved too sweet for our liking, and even the earthy pu’er couldn’t balance the sugar that had been, in our opinion, unnecessarily added.
No worries, though – the extra wait gave us time to browse the bread, which certainly didn't dissapoint. We chose the popular Super Durian (RMB 28), which easily stretched the length of my forearm, and was made with fresh durian and dried mango. As with typical bread from our sugar-loving islander brothers down south, it's made using fine flour, giving it a softer and bouncier texture than, say, European loaves. Finally, the fresh durian meat did not disappoint, its strong smell and creamy consistency shining through loud and clear.
Nayuri's decor is discernably modern in style with nice lights, white tiles, and sofas luring patrons to stay and photograph their food until every last crumb and sip. We have yet to brave the queues of HeyTea, but Nayuki proves itself as a great substitute if you happen to find yourself craving cheese tea in the west of Beijing.
Nayuri
Daily 10am-10pm. 3F-20/21A/21B, Joy City, 131 Xidan Beidajie, Xicheng District (6651 7920)
奈雪の茶：西城区西单北大街131号西单大悦城购物中心3F-20/21A/21B
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Email: tracywang@thebeijinger.com
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Photos: Tracy Wang
