A NEW tea shop and anime gift store hopes to fill a gap in the market in North Wales after opening in the town late last month.
“Boba Geeks” was opened at Unit 1, Lyric Buildings on Market Street, Rhyl by Darryl Maxwell and Taylor Farrell on Friday, October 28.
Darryl and Taylor have relocated from Llangollen, where they previously ran a similar store.
Their new premises in Rhyl sells everything from bubble tea and Hungarian chimney bread to graphic novels and anime figures.
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Take a look inside the new bar and bistro on Rhyl’s seafront!
Darryl said: “The chimney bread and bubble tea are probably the best things we do - we had a couple of Hungarian people in this week who loved the chimney bread.”
Originally a traditional Hungarian street food snack, chimney bread has a crisp exterior covered in walnut sugar, and is soft inside.
It's a popular serving at Christmas parties, or as a dish on December 25 itself.
Bubble tea, meanwhile, is a drink made by blending tea with milk, fruit and fruit juices, then adding tapioca pearls, before shaking vigorously.
It originated in Taiwan in the 1980s.
But for Darryl, as much as their refreshments may have gone down a treat with customers so far, they’re perhaps not what he sees as the shop’s USP.
He added: “It's the anime stuff which makes us a little bit different to anyone else. Right now, there's nobody else doing this in the town.
“We've got t-shirts, a couple of hundred books, comics, graphic novels, figures... we've had a few people come in and get extremely excited about the fact we've got books and figures... there's not one here at all (like us) in Rhyl now.
“We've also got bubble waffles and in the shop, we’ve got popular stiff like Stranger Things, Gremlins t-shirts, Rick and Morty, Jurassic Park, Star Wars - pretty much anything geeky.
“The anime stuff is definitely niche, but we also concentrate on stuff that would have a fanbase (like the aforementioned brands), rather than just an everyday thing."
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