Is Sanlitun's White Rabbit Candy Milk Tea Store Worth Going Hopping Mad For?
Few treats trigger more nostalgia in China than White Rabbit, which of course makes them a prime candidate for the guochao craze currently sweeping the country. This trend, written 国潮 guócháo, involves long-beloved domestic brands "reinventing themselves with crossover and ancillary products to entice a new breed of millennial shoppers," according to this recent piece on the movement by South China Morning Post.
What that means here is that the time-honored White Rabbit brand (which this year celebrates its 60th anniversary) is looking to re-tantalize patrons who grew up chomping on their milky sweets as kids with new milk tea and ice cream variations. In Beijing, that means opening a new store in the heart of Sanlitun Soho.
The brand extension has thus far been a successful enough to prompt four-hour-long waits at the White Rabbit stand in Shanghai, which was opened in conjunction with bubble tea company Happy Lemon. In Beijing they've teamed up with a nondescript shop in Sanlitun Soho called Yokikano Tea, drawing thankfully smaller but still impressive crowds of a few dozen when we recently stopped by.
There’s good news and bad to be found for Beijing foodies who decide to queue up. For starters, the White Rabbit milk tea is a major letdown. It features only the faintest hint of flavor from the famed candy before giving way to a generic, sweetened oolong taste. If it weren’t for the throwback bunny logo and eye-catching red, white, and blue color scheme on the cup, you’d hardly know you were slurping on anything remotely related to White Rabbit.
Thankfully, the White Rabbit ice cream is a true winner. It’s creamy and thick and each lick unleashes the distinctly sugary, milky, vanilla-y flavor of the renowned Chinese taffy. The sturdy, layered waffle cone puts the dessert over the top, both for nostalgia-driven Chinese patrons and the otherwise uninitiated.
While we vastly preferred one product over the other, both the ice cream and the milk tea are noteworthy as an ambitious new chapter in a brand that has seen plenty of plot twists over the years: from its ubiquity among Chinese patrons to its gradual sale in over 50 countries around the world, from it being bestowed to American president Richard Nixon in 1972 during his breakthrough visit to the then hermetic PRC to the company's CEO being killed by – get this – a rock-kicking monkey back in 2016. Now patrons have a chance to partake in the latest piece of White Rabbit lore in Beijing. We just recommend that you skip the mediocre milk tea and do so in cone form instead.
Yokikano Tea (White Rabbit Milk Tea and Ice Cream)
Daily 10am-11pm. 2-101, Bldg 2, Sanlitun Soho, 8 Workers' Stadium North Road, Chaoyang District (159 9836 9066)
朝阳区工人体育场北路8号三里屯SOHO2号商场2-101
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Photos: Kyle Mullin
