Ba Cha — Restaurant in Markham

ACTUAL RATING 4.5

Ba Cha recently opened up in the Langham Square plaza and are having a BOGO promotion until May 31st. We've heard mixed reviews about this place, so we've decided to give it a try ourselves!

TLDR: We highly recommend the drinks that we tried! Very refreshing drinks, & the teas that they used were quite fragrant.

We've seen some reviews say that the wait time was really long, but fortunately, when we got there, there was no one in line! The staff were quick to take my order and make my drinks. Total wait time from when we ordered to when we got our drinks was ~5mins.

What we tried + review:

Loaded Mango Pomelo (XL) ($8.99 + tax): Very refreshing!! & as obvious as this is, make sure you mix the drink well! I didn't do that thoroughly at the start, and the drink tasted meh... (We could taste that the mango wasn't fully ripe yet). However, once we mixed it well, all of the different layers complimented each other perfectly! The drink ended up being soooo good. It was perfect in sweetness and creaminess, and we could no longer taste that bit of sourness from the mango slush. We also loved how they added some tea into it as well - it gave it a bit of fragrance. The only thing is that the pomelo chunks were a bit too big and kept getting stuck in the straw - that part was a bit frustrating, but the drink was worth the struggles.

All in One Black Milk Tea (XL) (NOTE: Toppings normally include tapioca, grass jelly, red bean, peanut, and pudding, but due to availability and preferences, we had grass jelly & sago instead) ($6.99 + tax): We were worried that their milk tea would taste diluted and overly sweet. However, it was actually perfect in sweetness for us, and the drink had a nice tea fragrance! We got less ice and regular sugar (as recommended by the staff). Normally, we get 50-75% sugar, so if you normally get 0-30%, you can consider getting less sugar here, but their regular sugar level (100%) really wasn't too sweet! Hopefully this stays consistent.

If you get the XL sized drinks, know that the straws aren't long enough - they're right at lid level. If you get a slush or have toppings in your drink, this shouldn't be a problem until you reach the last bit of your drink.

We also want to note that you may think that these drinks are pretty pricey, but the ones we got were XL! If you look at the prices of their large sized drinks, it's pretty standard compared to many other bubble tea places. Bubble tea in general is just pricey nowadays, period.

We'll be back & look forward to trying some of their...

I am a little bit disappointed with the drinks. Atheistically wise, the drinks looked great but the taste was not there. Maybe the quality of the drinks dropped due to their recent BOGO promo which ends this coming Monday May 31st. My Mango Pomelo drink was icy and not creamy. I even tried to mix it but no avail. It's like the drink was not well made. There was barely any mango flavor and the drink tasted watered down. There was also a lack of mango and I couldn't detect any pomelo even though I've seen pictures online the drink with tons of pink pomelo at the bottom. I thought they may have ran out of pomelo but I did noticed what little pomelo inside the drink after I took a few sips.. I read a few reviews that praised the drink as delicious so I totally didn't except the drink to be this bad. Not sure what happened. Maybe new staff didn't know how to make the drink properly? For a $10 regularly priced drink, I expected much more since mango pomelo is one of my favourite drinks (maybe I got used to other places that make a better Mango Pomelo Sago Drink).

My friend ordered the Papaya drink and it was also an equal disappointment as it barely had any taste of the Papaya Fruit. My Dragon Fruit drink was slightly better as the cheese foam on top helped a little bit but yet again, barely tasting any Dragon Fruit. Both of the drinks felt watered down.

I was told their Fruit Tea was decent and their Milk Tea was better. I am quite reluctant to try them again especially when their regular drink price is $10! Would I consider trying them again? Probably, but I will wait to see more reviews first before giving them...

The short version: Taste and flavour are ok, not bad but not really good either. The wait time is way too long. The prices without bogo wouldn’t make it worth it in my opinion.

Long version: First, it is like very slow, especially in comparison to the many other options of boba in the area. They had two staff working at 2:30 pm and their pace had no sense of urgency. It took a while to order, next to getting into a 4 person capacity room which they didn’t seem to try to enforce. The line to order was short but it moved slow to no fault of the customers. I ordered a loaded mango and pomelo and a brûlée brown sugar latte and it took over twenty 26 minutes. With that much wait you would expect handcraft delicious drinks that turned out to be incredibly underwhelming.

For the mango pomelo drink it had the lightest trace of mango, I felt like I was drinking blended icy pomelo with a sliver of mango with sago. In terms of the brown sugar brûlée, it was the only redeeming element which is not a high praise but Tiger sugar is right across the plaza so why not get better?

The last thing to note is, and I could be wrong. I watched an employee come into the shop put on gloves not washing their hands and start slicing watermelon, which during a pandemic just don’t sit right. Also, their straws for the large cups also aren’t long enough you get a single cm...