Nine matcha specialists. Not one tea house.
Issue 11
Every place in Tokyo we have reviewed for matcha turned out to be a coffee bar, a converted bathhouse, or somewhere that sells shisha until five in the morning. That says something about who is taking the drink seriously.
There is a backstreet in Nezu where the building still looks like what it used to be. Tiled entrance, high ceiling, the particular proportions of a room built for a lot of people to be wet in at once. It was a public bathhouse. Now it is one of the best places in Tokyo to drink matcha, and the espresso machine behind the counter is not the reason anyone is queuing.
We went looking for a tea house and kept ending up somewhere like this.
Nine places in Tokyo running a serious matcha programme. Eight are coffee shops. The ninth is a bar. Not one is a tea house.
The thing we noticed
That number is not a filter we applied. It is what the catalog looks like when you sort for matcha and read what comes back.
It is not that we avoided tea houses either. There are several in the Tokyo catalog, reviewed and scored like everything else. They just are not where the interesting matcha turned out to be. The interesting matcha is being made by people whose day job is espresso, in rooms built for something else entirely.
You can see it on the menus. Ten years ago a Tokyo cafe said matcha latte and stopped. Now it tells you the growing region, the blend, and how it was ground. Ujitawara. Yame No. 1 from Fukuoka. Kyoto Uji, named as such. That is the vocabulary specialty coffee spent twenty years teaching people, borrowed wholesale and pointed at a different leaf.
MATCHA&ESPRESSO MIYANO-YU
The bathhouse. It is in a Nezu backstreet and the name tells you the order of priorities, matcha first. The espresso is genuinely good and still not the reason to go. There is a private room you can book if you want the place to yourself for an hour.
LAMBERT
A seventy-year-old house in Hyakunincho, reservation only if you want to sit inside, card only once you are there. The iced matcha latte is the clearest example we have found of what the drink is supposed to do: a first hit of bittersweet grass, deep umami underneath, then a clean and almost mineral finish that lingers instead of collapsing into sugar.
- MATCHA&ESPRESSO MIYANO-YU Steep PickNezu, Bunkyo · Tokyo · Steep Index 8.5/10
A renovated public bathhouse in a Nezu backstreet serving exceptional matcha lattes and good espresso, with a private room available for booking and staff warm enough to make you stay longer than planned.
- LAMBERT Steep PickHyakunincho, Shinjuku · Tokyo · Steep Index 8.5/10
A suteki, zen matcha sanctuary inside a 70-year-old Shinjuku house, reservation-only to sit inside and worth planning around.
- THREE Steep PickSangenjaya, Setagaya · Tokyo · Steep Index 8.7/10
An unmarked second-floor room in Sangenjaya pouring what may be the best matcha in Tokyo, then turning into a cocktail and shisha bar at six.
THREE
The newest one, and the strangest. An unmarked second floor in Sangenjaya that pours a stone-milled Yame No. 1 until six in the evening and then turns into a cocktail and shisha bar until five in the morning. It is also the first venue we have ever tagged for matcha that is not a cafe. Order the houjicha cheesecake with it.
How to tell the difference
The dividing line is not tea house versus cafe. It is sweetened versus not.
A good matcha latte in Tokyo right now opens bitter and grassy, carries real weight underneath, and finishes clean. If the first thing you taste is sugar, you have the other version, and plenty of places still serve it under the same name.
What this is not
We should be careful here, because there is a bigger claim available and it is not true.
Matcha has not overtaken coffee in Tokyo. The best matcha score in our catalog is a 9.4, and eight coffee venues score higher than that. This is not a story about matcha winning. It is a story about matcha being taken exactly as seriously as coffee, by the same people, in the same rooms, using the same words.
Smaller claim. More interesting one.
On our radar
All nine venues are reviewed on steep with full scores, and the longer version of this argument is up as a guide this week. Nine rooms is enough to see a pattern. If you know a Tokyo tea house doing matcha at this level, reply and tell us.