This Filipino Shop in Plano Suits Us to a Tea

To call itself the go-to Dallas-area spot for experiencing Filipino tea culture is a bold statement. While admittedly skeptical of the promise, we stopped by Tea Town, in one of Plano’s many East Asian cultural hubs, on a weekend afternoon. While the area is arguably lacking in other Filipino restaurants as a standard of comparison, a couple of fancy drinks and fresh desserts convinced us that Tea Town would ranks pretty highly.

The visionary behind the Plano fixture is owner Jojo Gutierrez, who turned the shop into Plano’s very own Filipino tea haven. The entrepreneur moved to the U.S. from the Philippines about 14 years ago.

“I noticed there were a lot of boba shops in this area,” Gutierrez says. “But none quite like the ones in the Philippines.”

His passion for Filipino flavors and culture naturally spawned Tea Town in 2019.

“There’s so many flavors in the Filipino tea world that people here wouldn’t even know about otherwise. This is my way of bringing a small piece of my hometown here,” he says.

The dining room is modest and intimate, with just six tables and a lounge area that accommodate fewer than 30 guests. Listen to the whirrs of the coffee machine behind a thin curtain, the only divide between the kitchen and the dining quarters. From the seating to the decor, it’s minimalistic with a home-like ambiance; we lingered longer than expected.

The tea shop’s most popular drink according to Gutierrez is the Buko Pandan ($6.90), a creamy coconut-based drink with jelly and toasted coconut flakes at the bottom. It makes a good stage-opener for more extravagant drinks like the Halo-Halo milkshake ($8.70), a shaved-ice concoction that’s embellished with colorful fruit jelly and sweetened red beans. The Leche Flan Latte is also popular. It has chunks of the tea shop’s signature egg flan floating in a cup of brown sugar syrup. On weekends, you can savor the tea shop’s Taho Latte, a spoonable breakfast drink made with silky blocks of tofu drenched in brown sugar syrup.

Drinks pair excellently with a variety of Filipino street food, which costs $7 to $12 per plate. Options range from fried fish or shrimp balls to more familiar snacks like popcorn chicken or meat-filled egg rolls. Don’t leave without exploring the tall shelves of fresh-baked Filipino desserts, including traditional bibingka rice cakes or sapin-sapin, a glutinous sweet made of ground ube and jackfruit.

“I love seeing all these people come in from different walks of life to experience Filipino culture,” Gutierrez says. “We’re not sure what the future holds, but we’re always testing out new drinks and trying to make this a more immersive cultural experience.”

A visit to Tea Town is a cultural experience indeed. Though the food and drinks are light, we feel we walked away with a full appreciation for everything the Filipino tea world has to offer.

Tea Town, 2731 W. 15th St., Plano. Daily, noon – 9 p.m.