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 a real support cast, real local hires, and a belief that a neighborhood café can feel personal without feeling small.
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.
Bubble & Pearl’s Boba Lab is meant to feel like a place with history, crushes, playlists, references, cravings, and comfort food logic behind it — not just a pretty cup and a generic menu board. Drinks matter. Savory bites matter. Waffles matter. But the feeling underneath them matters too.
