Cheese tea is trending, and Old Pasadena is now in on the poorly kept secret. Proleçe Tea is a new tea bar just south of Colorado Boulevard with a brown and white color scheme, copper lanterns, and wall sporting a word cloud that compiles global words for tea. The menu touts savory cream cheese atop tea smoothies like Strawberry Kiss and Mango Tango.

Mango Kiss ($5.35) features any icy, refreshing smoothie that blends mango chunks, mango syrup, and jasmine green tea. The topping consisted of cream crafted with cream cheese, sweetened condensed milk, and sea salt. After taking each sip of smoothie through the valve – plugged with a red plastic heart – I received a savory flourish of fluffy, balancing “cheese.”

Proleçe [pro-lay-chey] translates from Serbo-Croatian as spring, and Mango Kiss delivers on that optimistic name.