By Stacy Brooks, originally published in the Heavy Table newsletter

I’ve known my friend Heather since second grade, and she’s always had an offbeat sense of style. In high school, when my bedroom decor could be summed up as “on sale at Target,” she was filling antique glass bottles with tap water that she dyed with blue and green food coloring and lining them up in her windows to create a stained glass effect. Those bottles of colored water were delightful then and have stuck with me twenty years later—it’s inspiring to see someone happily doing their own thing, even when it’s kind of out there.

That’s what I love about L2 @ Tii Cup, a speakeasy that recently opened above the local boba chain’s Uptown location. Most speakeasies channel the Prohibition era, with alleyway entrances and windowless rooms. L2 is the opposite: you go through a nondescript door in a fluorescent-lit boba shop to a sunny upstairs with a shimmery metallic wall behind the bar, shelves of potted plants, a flat screen TV displaying a flickering fireplace, and a deck overlooking Hennepin Avenue.

The menu builds on the surroundings’ quirky feel. Nearly every drink is inspired by the tea shop downstairs, in some cases quite literally—think boba pearls and flavors like ube, lychee, or matcha. With other drinks, the connection is more subtle and nods to Thai, Chinese, and Vietnamese cuisines, bringing in ingredients like five spice-infused vermouth and the flavor profile of tom yum soup.

The novelty factor of alcoholic boba drinks was irresistible, so we started with the Tii Cup Old Fashioned ($13), which features Japanese whiskey, black tea-infused sugar syrup, and a side of boba. Without the boba, it’s a solid old fashioned, and the black tea notes deepen the oak flavors of the whiskey. Add in the boba, and it’s a more whimsical drink—instead of getting one cherry at the end, there’s a bunch of sweet bites as you go, with the boba getting increasingly boozier as they steep in the cocktail.

We also ordered the Viet ‘75 ($12), a riff on a French ‘75 made with gin, hibiscus, lime, and strawberry popping boba. It’s perfect for a summer evening—tart and floral, with an appealing brightness. The mouthful of popping boba at the bottom is like winning a jackpot—instead of getting a single sphere at a time through a straw, they flood out of the glass like a slot machine spitting out coins.

Although the “add boba to booze” gimmick is entertaining, the cocktail menu has plenty of depth beyond the boba drinks. The Ube-bae ($13) is a gorgeous rum-based concoction served in a highball glass painted with vivid purple swirls. It’s definitely a dessert cocktail, but it’s not overwhelmingly sweet. It’s more like you’re in the hands of an expert pastry chef, with the lemongrass and ginger providing a tingly complexity.

The Matcha Yuzu Daisy ($12) was my favorite drink of the evening. Matcha-infused tequila is paired with yuzu citrus and a sea salt milk foam, for a drink that’s earthy, creamy, and just a little bit sweet. The matcha flavor is so wonderfully pronounced that you don’t realize how alcoholic this thing is until you’ve finished every last drop and are unselfconsciously sucking the salty-sweet foam off the ice cubes.

There aren’t any non-alcoholic drinks on the L2 menu, but the entire Tii Cup menu is available to order, including boba tea, loose leaf tea, and espresso drinks. At many spots, the cost of spirit-free cocktails approaches parity with their alcoholic counterparts, so it’s nice to see lots of interesting alcohol-free options in the $5-$7 range.

Much of the food menu is the same as what’s on offer at Tii Cup, with items including popcorn chicken, tofu, bubble waffles, and biing (shaved snow with a variety of toppings). We decided to focus on the L2-specific menu items, starting with the Braised Pork Bowl ($15), a rice bowl with chunks of pork, pickles, and a soy-marinated hard boiled egg. A little more pork would have been nice—the meat-to-rice ratio felt a little stingy for the price—but the flavors are so on point that’s a minor quibble. The pickles have a delicate tanginess, the egg adds a punch of umami, the pork is tender, and everything melds together into a comforting, homey dish.

We also got a six-piece order of Chicken Wings ($10.45), which are flavored with a choice of five-spice dry rub, a Thai chili cilantro green sauce, or a coconut panang curry red sauce. We went with the green sauce and loved the contrast between the cooling, herbal quality of the cilantro and the heat of the chili. The wings themselves were juicy, with an appropriate breading-to-meat ratio that soaked up the sauce but didn’t smother the chicken.

The Taro Fries with Ube Dip ($8) were…intriguing. The texture is fluffy and starchy, more like fried breadfruit or yucca than a traditional potato-based fry. Flavorwise, they’re slightly sweet. The lavender-hued ube dip is basically a sweet aioli, which is as strange as it sounds. It’s unlike anything I’ve encountered before but it was so weirdly fascinating that I ate it all and would order it again. The taro fries didn’t really work as a side to the pork bowl or chicken wings, but they might function well as a standalone appetizer or a bridge between dinner and dessert.

So many recently-opened restaurants and bars in the Twin Cities have a certain sameness. The chic decor and roasted cauliflower and espresso martinis mesh together into an experience that’s generally pleasant, but the specific details start fading away as soon as you pay the check.

L2 @ Tii Cup is not that. It’s my friend Heather’s glass bottles filled with colored water—it’s totally its own thing. It’s quirky and creative, and even when the choices are kind of odd, they’re interesting. My evening there was a delight, and it’s going to stick with me for a long time.

L2 @ Tii Cup is located at 2645 Hennepin Ave. and is open Friday-Saturday 4-10 p.m., and Sunday 3-9 p.m.

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