Chatime Bubble Tea — Restaurant in Toronto

3.5 stars... the drinks are kinda good. The location is a bit of a different story. Come with lots of patience. Even if you're at the front of the line, they may take 7 minutes to get to you. Really.

Right by UofT and ROM, you have ChaTime in the perfect location except right now it's under a mess of scaffolding. It's open but its so hard to see where it is from the street right now. Just look for a flash of purple signage and you're there. The store has done one thing well... it's put the line direct from the door up the side to the ordering spot. It's not crowded into the front or spilling into the seating area. The seating area has a number of tables but I'm going to be honest, it's a bit of a mess. It's clear the UofT students love this spot because you can see so many just take up entire tables themselves while studying or it's a mess of old napkins. This is definitely an university hang out spot.

As for service, it's 'interesting'. I got here before the crowd and I just saw the line up from just me to at least 12 people behind me. The problem... something was amiss with the previous order and they needed 2 people to fix it for at least 7 minutes. Seeing how I was at the front, it was a bit annoying to wait for so long but I would REALLY hate it if I was the 12th person at the end.

Mango Juice QQ - to call this juice would be wrong. Mango fruit drink ... that's probably right. It's a light clear orange sip that's pleasant and not too sweet when you ask for 50% sugar. The QQ part is really the two types of chewy toppings. Their regular boba and then the coconut jelly. One thing weird about the jelly... they're length is wider than the straw so it often clogs the straw. I ended the drink with almost all the coconut jelly still in the drink. Boba was nice and chewy and not over cooked. I'd order this again but just with boba only. 3.5/5

Coffee Smoothie - this one was ok ... I feel like they forgot to get all the ice blended cause every sips had these chunks in it. Flavour wise it wasn't bad but I think it wasn't flavourful as it needed to be. 3.5/5

Lesson learned here ... if there's a line up, keep walking and go somewhere else. Even if there's no line, it's debatable to recommend this spot and maybe you should keep...

Poor quality compared to other locations. :(

I usually go to the location near bloor/Christie or Yonge/college, and almost always get a taro milk tea so I’d say I have a fairly good idea of how it should taste.

I also prefer to get less ice or no ice because I like to savour my bbt and sip away slowly, which, with regular ice would result in a watery drink near the end.

At every other location the tearistas would adjust for this, but at this location I literally saw the employee fill the cup about 70% full with the taro milk tea, and fill the rest up with...WATER. I’ve never seen another location or bbt chain do this...at Coco they sometimes fill the rest of the cup with a bulk made milk tea if the cup isn’t full, but certainly not with water. Not wanting to say anything I took my drink as is, but as soon as I tried it I can confirm it tasted like a very diluted cheap powder based taro milk tea. Nothing like the fresh taro texture that Chatime is known for. Needless to say I won’t be returning to this location again. I also hope there hasn’t been a recipe change to their taro milk tea because I actually really liked...

Chatime is usually a solid choice when you have a bubble tea craving but in this COVID-19 environment, I was a little disappointed at how they set up their store for customers.

They blocked off access to the entire dine-in section of the store and forcing everyone to use the one narrow path to go in, wait, and leave the store. That is not smart use of your space!

I felt ok because there was no other customers in the store at the time but it's located right near the U of T campus so it could be really busy with back-to-school reopening soon.

I would hesitate to go into the store if I saw that everyone was rubbing shoulder to shoulder to enter and leave the premises.

They should create a one-way loop so that customers leaving go around through the dine-in area to leave.

The four of us ordered the same thing, grass jelly roasted milk tea, with different variations in ice, sugar, and milk type (they offer oat milk now).

There was only one person manning the whole operation behind the counter.

We had to go back to get one of the drinks re-done as it was not correct. They happily provided a...