Boba Square

With clean branding and a memorable name, Boba Square offers slushies, smoothies, frappes, shakes, fruit teas, milk teas, and Vietnamese coffee, plus limited snacks – originally macarons, now popcorn chicken. There were formerly two locations, but the District at Tustin Legacy shop closed in 2023, leaving only an Irvine location near Zion Market.

Our experiences with Boba Square have been sharply up and down over the years, though down enough in our last visit that we stopped returning. While most of their drinks are okay to good, when they miss – like their watery and grainy Oreo matcha smoothie – they miss so hard that we just want to discard the drinks, which is something we almost never consider. It’s hard to know whether the issues come from bad recipes, bad ingredients, bad prep, or all of the above.

For an extended period, the now-closed Tustin location had the warning shown below posted on the counter. Boba Square is the only restaurant we’ve ever seen warn people about the dangers of handling one of their drinks in a normal way rather than just fixing the way it was serving them.