One Zo Boba

It’s hard to overstate the excitement we felt when One Zo Boba opened its first Orange County location back in 2019. During a period of intense local competition for boba tea drinks, fueled by new openings from new local concepts and established Asian brands, Taiwanese chain One Zo promised something that no one else was offering at the time: multiple flavors of house-made boba, served fresh to order.

Most of their seven original boba flavors – honey, taro, strawberry, chrysanthemum, brown sugar, and black sesame – could be added to pretty much any drink for around $1. And those drinks (including bamboo charcoal lattes, roasted rice tea, fruit teas, brown sugar milk, and creamy “snow cap” drinks) touched many of the major trends of the time.

Initially, local excitement for One Zo was palpable: out the door lines formed in the hours before its soft opening, then streamed across a plaza parking lot for its grand opening. We found the drinks to be total winners, including fruit tea with mango and strawberry boba, a Tiger Sugar-style matcha latte with brown sugar boba, and watermelon green tea; their puffle waffles with ice cream (especially the Ultra Cocoa) were better than nearby specialist Cauldron, as well.