Before March Break, I got into watching a bunch of street food/food videos on YouTube. I came across a video for a Japanese Teppanyaki place, and was immedietly interested in the whole idea of watching them cook your food in front of you (a show and a meal). That led to a quick Yelp search to see if there were any in Toronto, and I eventually found Hibachi’s and came across a BlogTo article for Labothéry as well.
Labothéry is a place where you can customize your own bubble tea drink with their selection of flavours. It was a recent (ish) addition to the downtown area however I only heard about the place a week or so before our outing.
Labothéry is a place where you can customize your own bubble tea drink with their selection of flavours. It was a recent (ish) addition to the downtown area however I only heard about the place a week or so before our outing.
Our first stop for the day was Hibachi Teppanyaki & Bar.
Yelp had two differently priced menus in their photos which made it confusing because there was about a $7 difference between the teppanyaki sets. I’m not sure if the less expensive menu was for those who didn’t choose to sit by the grill, because my friend and I ended up sitting by where the chef’s cook. Our meals were about $30 after tax (we both chose the salmon set), which is on the more expensive side for a student’s budget. However, in my opinion it’s worth dropping by to see the whole process at least once.
The next place we went to was Labothéry, which is located about 20 mins away from the teppanyaki place. I couldn’t find prices beforehand so we went to the place prepared with at least $10. The lines could be pretty long (about a 30 min wait maybe?) but during my second visit on a Saturday afternoon (1pm maybe?) there was a very short line. This how it works:
- The base price of all drink styles is $3.25
- The drink styles available are Milk tea, slush or fresh tea (there’s also a hot drink option)
- Syrup syringes/flavour tubes are $1 each
- Fruit Cup: $2.75
- Fresh Milk/evaporated milk: $1.75
- Soy Milk: $2
- Toppings: $0.50
For the hot drinks they recommend choosing one powder and one syrup, and for the cold drinks you can mix and match two syrups or two powders. I don’t think you need to add sugar to the syrups because it’s already sweet enough but I do believe that you need sugar for the drinks made with powder. The toppings consist of jelly, boba and pearls. The boba are your classic chewy bubbles you get at bubble tea places, however the pearls are basically bubbles of syrup that burst. They all come in a variety of flavours.
The combination I created was a Mango and Rose flavoured slush with Mango and Honey pearls, it was $7.05 in total. This combination is pretty sweet if made with a slush, but moderately sweet when made with green tea. In the end, I would probably go back to Labothéry a few more times to craft custom drinks because, I really did like my concoction. It’s relatively cheap (in my opinion) and the drinks are insta-pic worthy.
If you have visited either one of these places let me know what you thought in the comments below!
