Boban Boba & Banh Mi Cafe

Normally, the opening of yet another Vietnamese restaurant in Little Saigon wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy, but we were surprised when two new restaurants opened at the same time, under the same Garden Grove roof, with mostly but not completely different menus. One of them is Boban Boba & Banh Mi Cafe, technically the second location of a concept that opened in Cypress around mid-2025, and its first to be co-located with a related restaurant: OneV Pho Bistro. While they’re technically separate, they have a lot more in common than one might initially gather.

While Boban’s website includes some seemingly outdated references to the name “Boban House,” Boban Boba & Banh Mi Cafe is probably a more fitting description here: Its Garden Grove location consists solely of a counter, a small cafe-style seating area, and a working kitchen that isn’t particularly intended for public viewing. Off to the left of this space is OneV Pho Bistro’s full-service dining room, while a large glass window on the right reveals an office space for OneV Group, a local investment company backing both restaurants. Investors aside, the Garden Grove restaurants are at least partially commonly operated; Boban and OneV Pho Bistro are apparently run by a niece and aunt, respectively.

Despite any overlapping management, Boban feels like an all-digital restaurant – to an extent that we found the experience off-putting. Walking in, we arrived at an unmanned front counter with large menu screens on the wall and a touchscreen-based ordering panel off to the side of a cash register. Nothing changed during our visit: Instead of having any person there to welcome guests, Boban just assumes people will figure out they need to use the touchscreen to navigate the menu and place orders. As we looked around the mostly empty space, our attention was immediately drawn to a small collection of dry-looking, Sysco-grade bakery items inside a glass-enclosed box, which turned out to be most of the restaurant’s desserts. They weren’t great enticements to explore the rest of the menu.

Even so, we paged through the touchscreen’s collection of menu items, finding eight banh mi sandwiches ($8.50 to $12.50), seven rice or salad bowls ($9.50 to $13.50), 26 drinks ($4.50 to $6.50), those cookie/brownie/muffin pastries ($2.50 to $3.50 each), and several coconut jellies ($6.50 each). Given this area’s massive number of well-liked Vietnamese banh mi and drink shops, all of this would have been easily ignored and forgettable if Boban’s options weren’t somewhat compelling.

But they are, particularly in the drink department. Interesting drinks such as matcha lychee ($6.50) aren’t just inexpensive by local standards but also pack legitimately strong matcha and fruit flavors into fairly large cups without going overboard on ice. Similarly, a black sesame cafe latte ($6.50) nicely combined an obviously nutty cream top with Vietnamese coffee and milk. Other coffee options include Biscoff or Oreo cookies, while teas range from orange and green Thai teas to brown sugar milk teas and multiple matcha variants. Given the quality of what we sampled, we might return here for the drinks alone, though most of them do require manual addition of $1 toppings including boba and jellies.