The World's Biggest Fast Food Chain Arrived To The US — Here's What We Tried On The Menu

As somebody who writes about food for a living, I was embarrassed that I'd never heard of Mixue before the chain opened its first stores in New York City last year. With over 40,000 locations, it's the world's largest fast food chain, though you won't find burgers and fries on the menu.

Mixue specializes in tea, coffee, soft serve, and fruity drinks. The company started in China in 1997, and with its first American stores, it's tapping into a massive new market. New York is already bursting with cafés, ice cream stores, and bubble tea shops, so I ventured into Mixue's Chinatown location last week to see why the chain's arrival is attracting so much attention.

The space was brightly lit and bursting with activity. There wasn't a line out the door, but a steady stream of customers was ordering from two touchscreens at the front of the store while a handful of busy workers churned out drinks and ice creams at breakneck speed. I paused for a photo with a giant plastic incarnation of the Snow King, Mixue's frosty mascot, and then got to work ordering.

Before I set out for Mixue, I did some research to find out what were the must-try items on the menu. The standard soft serve and milk tea stood out, and I also wanted to try a smattering of other desserts and frozen drinks. Unfortunately, when I arrived, a few coveted items had sold out, including the brown sugar milk tea and the pudding milk tea.

All the frozen desserts I tasted at Mixue had a soft serve base, and I was looking for a fluffy, pillowy texture carrying a slightly milky flavor that exemplifies delicious soft serve ice cream. I was hoping the desserts could sidestep the sickly sweetness that plagues some other fast food treats, and offer flavors and mix-ins that complemented the nature of the soft serve base.

When it came to tasting teas, I was looking for floral, grassy, and earthy notes, depending on the tea I was tasting. The menu at Mixue is highly customizable, so I also experimented with different levels of sweetness to see how much sugar satisfied my palate with each drink.

There's something nostalgic about macerated strawberries in a sweet syrup. They're a classic soft serve topping, one that brought me back to the days when I had no taste. But in this case, instead of amplifying the ice cream's clean dairy sweetness, the topping smothered it. The strawberry mixture is just too sugary, and on top of the soft serve ice cream, this dessert became a sugar bomb flavor of epic proportions. 

The sundae tasted more like a muted facsimile of the bright, softly acidic flavor you expect from fresh strawberries. There was something discernibly artificial about the dessert — like it was made in a lab instead of a creamery. The strawberry bits were slimy and a little tougher and denser than I expected. This dessert became less disastrous when I gave it a stir and distributed the topping evenly throughout the ice cream, though at that point it became a strawberry milkshake, which you can also order from the Mixue menu.

It took only one sip for me to understand why Mixue is known for its milk tea. I've been drinking the beverage for years, from family-owned milk tea shops in Chinatown to beverage giants like Gong Cha (another popular fast food chain that originated outside the U.S.). I consider myself a milk tea connoisseur of sorts. For the uninitiated, milk tea is what it sounds like: tea with added milk. At Mixue, the famous caffeinated drink has the floral, slightly earthy notes of black tea mellowed with the perfect proportion of milk. 

Mixue makes it easy to customize your drink, and I opted for 30% sugar as I don't like my milk tea too sweet. For somebody with only a slight sweet tooth, this sugar level was just enough to round out the flavor of the tea without making the drink cloying. I chose the milk tea with boba pearls, a classic addition. While these dark tapioca balls don't add much flavor, they give you something to chew on and provide a textural element that makes the drink more interesting. But be sure not to overindulge — eating too much boba can make you sick. At $3.99, it's not as jaw-droppingly cheap as the soft serve, but it's a reasonable price for a boba milk tea, especially in Manhattan.

I arrived at Mixue soon after it opened at 11am, and I thought this coconut latte might propel me into the rest of my day with a hit of caffeine and a well-rounded earthy coffee flavor mellowed out by nutty notes of coconut. I was wrong. The drink was flat and lifeless, with little more taste than a cheap cup of diner coffee. The coconut flavor was barely discernible, far from the silky, rich taste of coconut milk that I'd hoped for. Even the essence of coffee itself was conspicuously absent, and the only coffee-adjacent flavor that penetrated the overwhelming blandness of this drink came in the form of a mildly burnt, bitter aftertaste.

I'll admit that for a specialty drink, it was cheap; few other places in Manhattan offer a latte for under $4. And the idea, which has been executed at other establishments with great success, is also laudable. This was the only drink I ordered hot instead of iced at Mixue, and I was surprised that it was served in a sealed cup with a straw, like the other boba teas, rather than a typical to-go coffee cup with a removable lid. Though at first I was afraid I'd burn my tongue drinking a hot liquid through a straw, the coffee was lukewarm, which only added to my distaste for it.

If you're heading to Mixue, there's a decent chance it's because you heard about the soft serve. Much like the chain's caped mascot, this soft serve is white, fluffy, and inspires a strange sense of joy produced at an industrial scale. While it didn't deliver the nuanced floral notes of the best vanilla ice creams, the cone at Mixue is by far the best soft serve deal I've encountered in New York: As of January 2026, it cost just $1.19.

Though I don't typically enjoy soft serve in the dead of winter, I was uplifted by the gentle sweetness and silky texture of Mixue's signature dessert. The flavor was milky, and the frozen treat melted on my tongue to reveal a level of sweetness that was pleasantly restrained. Not only did I find this soft serve to be more delicious than the McDonald's vanilla cone, but it was also cheaper. It came at a New York pace, too; my name was called mere seconds after I'd finished placing my order, and there was my soft serve, frozen in a perfect white swirl.

Seriously? $1.99 for an iced tea in New York City? For a moment before I placed my order for an iced oolong tea at Mixue, I thought I might be hallucinating. I also ordered my oolong with less ice (one of the customization options), so I ended up with more tea, which I recommend for penny pinching tea heads like myself.

Beyond being the cheapest iced tea I've bought in New York this decade, it was perfectly pleasant. I ordered it without sugar to get an unadulterated experience, and while the tea was a bit more bitter than the average oolong, it still had a grassy, floral flavor that was complex and inviting, and I found myself finishing it off even though it was freezing cold outside.

Oolong may not share the fame of green or black tea, but it's very much worth adding to your repertoire. While green tea leaves are barely oxidized during processing and black tea leaves are fully oxidized, oolong is somewhere in the middle, meaning it can encompass a wide range of flavor profiles. This oolong tasted a bit closer to black tea, but still had enough freshness to make it discernibly oolong. If you find yourself in Manhattan hankering for an iced tea, I recommend this one wholeheartedly.

Passion fruit has been trending for a few years now, and I'm not mad about it. This zingy, sour fruit has an aromatic tartness that gives drinks and dishes a little acidity and a tropical flavor. The passion blast from Mixue is worthy of the name, delivering the titular blast of passion fruit flavor at first sip.

The drink is also texturally interesting, with crunchy passion fruit seeds and chunks of lychee, a delicious fruit you won't find in U.S. grocery stores, suspended in the liquid waiting to get sucked up by the oversized straw. I got the drink with 30% of the standard amount of sugar, which I found ideal since passion fruit is naturally a bit sweet. The lychee also provided an added dose of sugar, and it had a fragrant, floral flavor that balanced out the more sour notes of passion fruit. 

I usually steer clear of fruit drinks like these at fast food restaurants because they're often loaded with sugar that detracts from the fruit flavor, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this drink. And as a gym rat, I was happy to learn that passion fruit is packed with protein, so I picked up some unexpected macros.

Everywhere you go these days, it seems there's a jolly green matcha-flavored concoction begging for your attention. One look at the matcha soft serve at Mixue, and I knew I had to see if the flavor matched the intense forest green color. At first lick, I tasted the distinct grassy, earthy, slightly bitter flavor of the titular tea.

Matcha can be intense, but in this case it wasn't overpowering, allowing the natural milkiness of the soft serve to balance it out. It mimicked the flavor of a well-made matcha latte, only a bit sweeter. Matcha is made of green tea leaves that have been crushed into a fine powder and it can leave a gritty sensation in the mouth, but this soft serve was smooth and pillowy. Once I had gobbled up enough of this gorgeously green concoction, I reached the waffle cone, which provided a gently sweet crunch that contrasted perfectly the earthy intensity of the matcha. It's a bit more expensive than the standard soft serve, but for those who like a little more flavor, this may be the cone for you. And with matcha prices on the rise, I recommend you get your hands on one pronto.

I'm not typically rooting for a fast food giant, but I have to admit I was impressed by the offerings at Mixue. Most notably, everything on the menu was priced very reasonably, which is not something you can say about most restaurants in New York City. Not everything I tasted was a home run, but the quality of the food and drinks was generally high, though I would steer clear of the chain's coffee drinks.

The store itself was unimpressive, with a bright color scheme that inspires anxiety and cold overhead lighting. There were also very few places to sit despite the fact that the store is quite spacious. It's a great place to get a drink to-go, especially if you're in a hurry — I was blown away at how quickly I was served.

Mixue's strongest items are its most famous ones: soft serve and milk tea. Though the fruity drink and iced tea I tasted were also delicious, these standbys clearly anchor the menu. I'm looking forward to popping by this summer, at the peak of soft serve season, and giving the creamy frozen dessert another try.