Sharetea
The rare boba tea chain on our "not revisiting again" list
With a half dozen locations in Orange County and nearly 40 across Southern California, Taiwanese brand Sharetea is one of the region’s larger boba tea chains – but given our experiences, not especially worth patronizing. After an odd initial visit, overly sweet drinks on later visits cemented our decision not to return.
We’ll give Sharetea partial credit for staying committed to the weirdness we originally experienced — this is the only boba shop of roughly 100 we’ve visited that will, when ordering certain small drinks and attempting to add boba, tell customers that they can only serve the boba separately (in a second small cup), because they couldn’t possibly assemble the drink and boba in a medium-sized cup together. This was so bizarre to us four years ago that we figured it was an employee mistake and couldn’t imagine it was actual policy. Fast forward to 2024, and we checked: It’s still happening, because… who knows?
ShareTea’s drink recipes are awfully sweet by default, too. Some of the drinks, including their non-alcoholic mojitos, tend to become reservoirs of ice and syrup rather than fully mixing. Others arrive with obvious sugar grains at the bottom of the cups. And still others are properly mixed but super sweet. If you cut the sugar, drinks such as their cocoa and matcha creamas become palatable.
There aren’t many boba shops we’d just avoid, but ShareTea is on our very short “do not return” list. Many other places get the basics correct when flavoring, mixing, and – we can’t believe we’re saying this – adding boba to drinks, so why patronize one that isn’t able to do things right, even when asked, for years?
Stats
Price: $$
Service: Counter
Open Since: 1992 (Taiwan), 2013 (US)
Addresses
16051 Brookhurst St. #F
Fountain Valley, CA 92708
714.617.5549
Additional locations in Irvine, Santa Ana, Lake Forest + Fullerton
Instagram: @shareteaoc