Photo: Tammie Teclemariam
This past Christmas Eve, it was the Snow King, and not Saint Nick, who came to town when the world’s biggest restaurant chain, Mixue (pronounced Me-shway), introduced its first two New York locations with a parade of caped snowmen — Mixue’s mascot — marching through K-town and Times Square where billboards flashed the chain’s frosty icon and his ice-cream-cone staff. Though Mixue’s Snow King is as white and puffy as Michelin’s Bibendum, he represents another gastronomic extreme: loss-leading, competition-undercutting pricing that has grown the tea and ice-cream franchise to more than 50,000 locations worldwide. As a guy leaving the Hell’s Kitchen Mixue said last week, “This is the cheapest shop in China.”
He was clearly disappointed. “I just came back,” the Brooklyn resident continued, saying that he had made his way to this New York location only out of curiosity. “I wouldn’t even go here in Asia,” he assured me. Four young women visiting from New Hampshire during the tail end of winter break seemed to be more content. The leader of the group described herself as a boba fan with an agenda for her New York trip. Heytea, visited earlier that day, had been a hit, but the quad was leaving Mixue underwhelmed since the fruit teas they’d come to try had mostly sold out. They settled for simpler iced milk tea with coconut jelly.
Like the Brooklyn guy, I was also wondering how such a bargain concept would translate to Manhattan’s famously expensive leases and extra-low margins. Mixue’s $1.19 soft serve and $2 lemonade is an exciting proposition in 2026, but despite their popularity elsewhere, is “affordability” enough compared to the cheese foam and ube milk everyone is drinking at the city’s other tea destinations? And is it even good?
On my first trip to Mixue’s Hell’s Kitchen outpost, where I met the New Hampshire tea fans, I didn’t understand quite how “sold out” the small shop was until it was my turn to order from the screen. I scrolled past a rainbow of unavailable floats and sundaes, and staff were closing down with more than an hour left before the official closing time. I left without ordering.
The next day I tried my luck at the Herald Square Mixue, which is clearly the New York flagship. It’s not just bigger but, crucially, wraps around a highly trafficked corner of West 32nd Street and Broadway, where Mixue’s theme song (an “Oh! Susanna” rip-off) can be heard from every point. Mixue sits directly across the street from Taiwanese brown-sugar and boba specialist Tiger Sugar and is within view of a Heytea on Sixth Avenue, but, at 3 p.m. on a Friday, this was the only drink shop with a line.
I estimated 40 people ahead of me waiting to go inside and could feel the increasing gravity of newcomers joining from behind. Besides the fact that everything costs less than five dollars, another reason this line was so long was that almost everyone arrived with a buddy, if not a pack. I would have been concerned for the jacketless couple in front of me, both shivering with their hands in their pockets, if they hadn’t been in the company of more adequately dressed friends, one of whom informed me it had been their idea to eat ice cream outside in January in the first place. “I was dragged here,” he said. Before I could follow up, all six of them ducked under the rope to join some more people closer to the front.
Of two young ladies with backpacks standing behind me, one had already been here twice while the other was a first-timer. “It’s worth the wait,” said the veteran, but, she added, the line wasn’t anywhere as long on her earlier visits. “I got ice cream,” she said, “but what I want is peach oolong. They’re always sold out.”
Strawberry-jasmine tea and $1.19 soft serve.
Photo: Tammie Teclemariam
She would be out of luck on this day, too, though the scarcity wasn’t as dire as in Hell’s Kitchen. After 17 minutes of standing in line, I ordered a strawberry-jasmine tea and plain soft serve in a cone, which cost $4.23 after a $2.50 drink discount offered by the screen. Employees yelled numbers over the chatter, conversing with customers in English and Chinese. My drink was ready in less than five minutes, and I shuffled a few feet over to the ice-cream machines and waited for my number to be called again. Traffic might not have been organized beyond a rope that divided the room down the middle, but everything moved along efficiently and people seemed genuinely delighted with their treats, like the tall cups of ice cream drowned in iced coffee, which the shivering guy’s group ordered in multiple. “They get you addicted and they jack up the price,” said the formerly shivering man while reaching for his affogato.
I couldn’t complain about my simple cone, piped full of innocuously sweet and creamy ice cream on a crisp waffle cone. While attacking it on the sidewalk, I noticed two men who looked like the oldest people in the vicinity talking over matching ice-cream cones and lemonades. I approached them to see what brought them here. There was a reason they stood out from the crowd: One was Mixue corporate, the head of business development for the Americas, the other a franchisee of an upcoming location in Downtown Brooklyn, both all too happy to speak with me on the record about the brand’s arrival.
I asked if the plan was to “jack up the price,” like the guy inside had said. “Our prices in China haven’t changed in the past ten years. Do you remember what Starbucks or McDonald’s cost ten years ago?” the representative said with practiced calm before holding up his lemonade loaded with sliced fruit. “In China, the average monthly income can buy 1,500 of these — this is a product that everybody can have.”
EAT LIKE THE EXPERTS.
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