Dan and Chai met at a boba shop over a decade ago for their first date. They fell in love, built careers, built a family, and carried that shared café-language through life in Corona, Orange County, Fallbrook, and now back in Corona with a boba shop of their own. Bubble & Pearl’s Boba Lab exists because that first-date energy never really left — it just got older, deeper, funnier, and more determined to become a real place.
This shop is built around Dan and Chai, their kids Felix and Evan, dog Oliver, and the local team helping the café grow day to day. It is a family project with real local hires, a growing support cast, and a belief that a neighborhood café can feel personal without feeling small — the kind of place with the parent dragged in by their anime kid, the anime kid dragging in the parent, the waffle thief, the musubi convert, and the friend who says they are not hungry.
The shop’s spirit pulls from anime, Japanese/Taiwanese/Vietnamese pop culture, convenience-food rituals, café history, media lore, and the layered feeling of 90s–00s Japanese food-and-drink spaces as seen across decades of anime. That is why the place leans cute, referential, comforting, and a little obsessive in the best way.
The real promise is simple: amazing drinks, real food, fair prices, and a table that feels like your kind of place. Drinks matter. Savory bites matter. Waffles matter. The feeling underneath them matters too — friendship, discovering favorites, sharing food, showing up after hard days, creating memories, bridging generations, and giving people a place where the comfort order, the new favorite, the colorful cup, and the warm bite can all belong.
