Naricha Tea & Coffee – Closed

Six months before opening as Naricha Tea & Coffee, the boba shop hidden in an Irvine plaza near Newport Beach operated as Bober Tea & Mochi Dough, part of a small chain that sells drinks, donuts, and stuffed animals in cute, heavily pink-decorated spaces – the aesthetics and toy gimmicks made more of an impression than the food and drinks. In late 2024, Naricha soft-opened with signs indicating that it was open while remodeling, leaving ambiguous the extent to which the new shop will ultimately differ from Bober; in any case, it felt like a substantially similar remix.

As was the case before, Naricha’s space was overloaded with Instagram-ready flowers, neon signs, and decor items such as a pink British-style phonebooth and mailbox, though they were moved around the boxy seating area, leaving the rear wall covered in candy heart-styled stickers. Marble tables offered ample seating, including green quilted benches and gold-framed pink chairs.

Like Bober, you ordered drinks (generally $6-$7) and mochi donuts from large touchscreen displays mounted on a wall with somewhat confusing paper menus. In addition to fruit teas, tea lattes, specialties, favorites, espressos, and Vietnamese coffees, the main menu’s “tea classics” section pointed customers to a second “Teapresso” menu of black, green, oolong, and fruit teas that are “individually brewed and made to order,” with a promise that “your patience will be rewarded!” Although we needed to do some online research to figure this out, the concept is apparently to use an espresso-style machine to differentiate Teapresso teas from batch-made ones, which should at a minimum be an interesting experiment for this shop.

But wait – there was more. New to Naricha is a “secret menu” with additional choices for $6.50 each, which you apparently needed to ask about at the very lightly staffed front counter. We weren’t sure how this will work, in practice: After inquiring about one intriguingly named option (“Angry Matcha”) that was on the touchscreen menu, undescribed, we were told that it was an experimental item and not actually available. Perhaps the “secret menu” should have waited until the not-secret menu was finalized.