My friends and I were on a mission: try as much boba tea in Chinatown as possible. Boba is Taiwanese milk or fruit tea served cold with black tapioca balls and in the greater Boston area usually costs between $3 and $3.50. My favorite flavors include red bean, mango and coconut. Our first stop was the Rainbow Caf (60 Beach St.) a four-table pan-Asian restaurant run by a small family-a grandma-in-the-kitchen type of place. We decided on three flavors: jackfruit; mango, because it's a safe bet, and taro (purple yam), because it is the flavor by which one should judge a good boba joint.

Rainbow passed all our tests. The jackfruit bordered on too sweet, but was tasty, and the consistency of the pearls was just right. The mango was conventional, but to its credit used real fruit juice. The taro just missed tasting like buttered popcorn, the usual complaint about the flavor, but was excellent for a ground purple yam that usually tastes something like buttered popcorn.

We also ate appetizers there. The crab rangoon was middling at best, but the wonton soup and veggie egg rolls were superb; the house tea was nice and hot, and best of all, free. The bill for three was $24.55 and included all the above. The restaurant also serves grass-jelly teas, but we were on a mission and excluded them this time around. We'll be back.

After Rainbow, we stopped at the next boba sign, in the window of Yan's Best Place Restaurant (52 Beach St.. We were lonely, one of two filled tables in the 10-table room, but we did receive excellent service from our almost-English-speaking waiter. We ordered the Szechwan spicy shrimp, served on a bed of broccoli with more-than-somewhat-spiced hot peppers. Despite ordering "mild," we needed a lot of rice and our trusty boba teas, plain milk and green tea this time. The green tea didn't have much to do with green tea as we knew it and was quite frothy. Meanwhile, the milk tea was just milk with boba and perhaps a little flavoring. The quality of the pearls themselves was excellent, but the ratio of too little liquid to too much boba caused frustrating tapioca leftovers. Both drinks were almost soothing, but the ice water went much better with the excellent shrimp. Yan's was $22 for the three of us; the food was worth it, the boba, not so much. There is a different menu for Chinese-speakers.

Moving on to Cambridge, Color is a tiny (10-table) Korean restaurant (166 Harvard Ave., in Allston), annoyingly closed on Sundays, but home to some of Boston's best Korean food and one of the only boba places in a 10 block area. It offers mostly fruit-based teas ($3), a favorite of mine being the rarely available red bean boba. Other choices abound, from taro to a splendiferous coconut and an incredibly stimulating mango. Color is not excellent in boba alone; it offers food including a stone bowl bibimbab ($10), a crazy-spicy beef and rice dish that requires much water but remains somehow enjoyable. There is also complementary kimchi (pickled and spiced cabbage), a legendary traditional Korean dish that may actually give its fans stomach cancer over the long term if consumed daily. Color is reasonably priced; boba plus food was about $15.

Boba can also be found at the Lollicup in the Super88 Supermarket (1095 Commonwealth Ave., Boston), but it is powder-based and sort of gritty-not well-mixed. I had chocolate milk-tea there, and it was basically Nestle Qwik with boba and ice ($3). The Boston Tea Stop (54 JFK St., Cambridge) is well-reputed, and has a large selection of boba. It is also warm and open until 1 a.m. on weekends for those waiting for the Brandeis shuttle in Harvard Square.

Bao Bao, back in Chinatown (77 Harrison Ave.), has a honey-ginger boba, complete with pieces of candied ginger (around $3), while the Eldo Cake House has boba alongside various baked concoctions. Eldo was not, alas, open when we visited Chinatown, or it would have been reviewed here. In Allston, there is the Infusions Tea Spa (110 Brighton Ave.), home of many flavors of conventional tea as well as the fruit and milk-based boba under discussion. I have not yet made it there to inspect the quality of boba, but friends seem quite enthusiastic.