Icha Tea (Chinatown)

Icha Tea’s original room is the Chinatown tea house other Toronto boba counters get measured against: 235 Spadina Avenue, Unit 4, a sit-down bar for ceremonial matcha, Gongfu service, and drinks built from actual leaves rather than a powder wall. Official site ichateashop.com traces the shop to Xing Su and Sijian Chen, opened on Spadina in 2017, with a Queen West sister at 996 Queen and a North York tea bar at 2 Sheppard. The footer lists this flagship phone as 416-546-6292. It is bigger in the back than the Spadina frontage suggests — a place you sit, not a kiosk you sprint through. First-timers: strawberry matcha latte if you want the house fusion; a Gongfu flight if you came to taste tea. Weekday early afternoon is the civil window for a table; evenings and weekends fill. No reservations on the official site. Do not treat this as a $6 tapioca dash — the point is the leaf.