Happy at Happy Lemon: Green Tea, Cream Cheese and other Things

Tired of Starbucks and Coffee Bean? Are Serenitea's sugar levels not high (or low) enough for you? Time to try something new. Happy Lemon is a popular tea franchise in Hong Kong, and thanks to a few trendy entrepreneurs, its now here in the Philippines! You can visit Happy Lemon's first Philippine foothold at Promenade Greenhills (in between Starbucks and Coffee Bean!)

What used to be the comic book section of Fully Booked is now a trendy tea house, Happy Lemon has a really (as in really) wide selection of tea drinks. You'll probably find something you'd like if you look hard enough. For me though, this was the only drink that caught my eye:

My drink (left) was Green Tea with Rock Salt and Cream Cheese! Now ain't that something new? When I ordered this, the lady at the counter asked me: "Sir do you know how to drink this?", "Nope!" I replied and she told me how to drink it: "Don't mix it, just drink it". As  you can see, the Green Tea and Cream Cheese are separate from each other. So when I drank it from a straw, it tasted like what it looked like, cold green tea at first, then cream cheese later. Rather disappointing! Nothing special at all.

 Halfway through, i just ended up going against ate's advise and mixed it up and it was a whole better experience. That super light  aroma filled green tea was given the weight of milky and creamy cream cheese with just a little kick of salt in every drink. It was a real pleasure to drink. It was NOT a Starbucks Green tea clone, No it wasn't, It was something else.

Then a friend of mine tried the same thing, and here is what I missed about ate's instructions. DON'T USE A STRAW! If you think about it, when drinking straight from the cup, the green tea at the bottom would flow through the Cream Cheese and Rock Salt, carrying the taste of the two. Now that's pretty clever!

Now if I could only remember why I had a straw in the first place!