Why Los Angeles?

From Turlock to Los Angeles

I'm originally from Turlock, California. If you've never been, it's a small agricultural city in the Central Valley, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone and the closest thing to boba is a Jamba Juice.

When I finished school with my civil engineering degree, I had one clear goal: see more of the world. I wanted to pick a city, live in it properly, and figure out whether it was where I belonged. Los Angeles was the first stop.

I arrived in 2015. Within a few months, I was hooked. Not just on the city generally, but specifically on LA's boba scene, which I quickly discovered is one of the best in the country. The sheer density of high-quality bubble tea shops in neighborhoods like Koreatown and the San Gabriel Valley is unlike anything you find elsewhere in the US.

But what I also discovered is that finding honest, current, useful information about which shops to visit was surprisingly hard. Yelp reviews go stale. Food blogs are filled with sponsored content. Most top-10 lists are copied from each other. Nobody had actually visited every shop and written a real review of each one.

Why This Guide Exists

So I started keeping notes. I visited every shop I could find. I paid for every drink out of pocket. I took photos, wrote down what I liked and didn't like, and eventually I had enough material to build the guide I wished had existed when I moved here.

Los Angeles is the right city for this guide because it has the boba scene to support it. Koreatown alone has 30+ shops within a few square miles. The San Gabriel Valley is a completely different universe of Taiwanese and Chinese-style bubble tea. Silver Lake and Echo Park have their own emerging scenes. And new shops are opening constantly.

The goal is to document all of it. Not just the popular spots, not just a curated best-of list, but every boba shop in LA County. That's a long-term project, and one that I'm building in real time.

LA as Home

After nearly a decade in Los Angeles, it's no longer just a stop on a journey. It's home. I work here as a structural engineer, I explore here as a boba obsessive, and I write here as the author of what I hope is the most useful boba guide in the city.

If you have a shop you think I should visit, or just want to talk boba, reach out. I'm always looking for the next great drink.