As it approaches five years at Tysons Corner Center, Cha Street Food is shaking up its drink offerings with a new cafe concept.
The Pakistani restaurant will officially launch Cha Cafe tonight (Thursday) with a DJ and free drinks for the first 50 customers to stop by, starting at 7 p.m.
“We came up with a new menu [that’s] exciting [but] still paying tribute to our South Asian roots,” said Saba Kamran, a partner at Cha who leads its food and beverage development. “A lot of the flavors are still the South Asian flavors, but then, [we’re] offering the refreshers and the coffees, and a little bit of a spin on the traditional chais that we were already serving.”
While the concept is new, the inclusion of a cafe will actually bring the restaurant closer to its owners’ original vision of a chai or tea-focused shop inspired by dhabas, a roadside food stall commonly found in India and Pakistan that sells tea and snacks.
Started in 2020 as a pair of food trucks stationed at Springfield Town Center, Cha Tea House morphed into a brick-and-mortar restaurant with its opening at 8056 Tysons Corner Center in December 2021.
Since then, the business has rebranded as Cha Street Food, partly because the original name confused some customers who mistook it for a boba tea shop, Kamran told FFXnow. It has also become just as recognized for its food as its drinks.
“That’s why we also felt like this rebrand, or this launch was a little bit necessary, to kind of take us back to our roots and what we were initially thinking we wanted to be,” she said.
The cafe launch isn’t changing Cha’s food menu, which continues to feature chicken tikka, shammi kababs, alou tikki, tawa chicken and other Pakistani-influenced dishes that can be ordered in most cases as a sandwich, wrap or bowl.
The drink options, however, have expanded with the addition of pink kashmiri, ras malai and pistachio cream lattes as well as several lemonade-based refreshers, including a mango dragon fruit fizz, lychee mint refresher, strawberry tamarind lemonade and a mint sparkler.
Cha’s signature chais can now also be ordered hot or iced with an option for cold foam on top, and a pistachio flavor has been added. Rounding out the cafe menu is a mango lassi matcha, milkshakes and two desserts — kulfi affogato and falooda, a rose-scented milk mixed with pistachio kulfi, strawberry jelly, vermicelli and basil seeds.
Among the new drinks, Kamran pointed to the ras malai latte — which is based on a popular South Asian dessert that consists of cheese balls soaked milk and cardamom — and the coffee take on the pink kashmiri chai as two that are “particularly specific to who we are.”
The decision to introduce coffee was influenced both by the needs of customers and trends observed in Pakistan.
“A lot of people come here in large groups, and some of them are tea drinkers, and then, some of them are coffee drinkers, and then we felt like there needed to be a little bit more offerings for those coffee drinkers,” Kamran said. “… Coffee has become a big trend in Pakistan as well. It’s something everyone is looking for, and it’s like a hangout spot. Back in the day, it used to be chai, but we find a lot of … the younger generations, they’re into more coffees than chais.”
The cafe menu is initially rolling out only at Tysons Corner Center, but depending on how it’s received, it could be introduced to Cha Street Food’s newer locations in Sterling and Capitol Hill as well.
It could also potentially spin off into a standalone concept that would serve drinks, desserts and light bites without being a full-service restaurant.
“We put a lot of hard work in curating these drinks and trying to stay in touch with our roots in coming up with those flavors,” Kamran said. “We tried really hard to bring something new for people that they’re not getting elsewhere in terms of the flavors offered, and we’re excited for people to come and try it and get their feedback.”
