December 2015: After a prolonged (4-year) stay of execution, the wonderful Omotesando Koffee is due to finally close its doors at the end of the month. That leaves only a few more days to revisit – or discover for the first time – this modern/retro Tokyo classic.
This was my original post from September 2011…
We dropped into Omotesando Koffee over the weekend and loved it. Not that it's the kind of place you'd stumble upon by chance in the grid of residential streets that lie between Omotesando and Gaienmae.
But it's really worth tracking down. Because it's a contemporary classic. You enter through an old-style gateway, into a neat little manicured garden...
...and step up into a traditional room complete with wooden pillars, tokonoma alcove and sliding shoji screens.
And in the middle of that room is the counter and gleaming red/silver espresso machine, all 'enclosed' in an open cuboid frame of black steel.
Owner Eiichi Kunitomo is a trained barista, and perfected his technique while living in Ischia (Tyrrhenian Sea / Gulf of Naples) for a while. An Osaka native, he says he'd love to take this idea down to Kansai, but it's way behind Tokyo in terms of espresso culture.
He brews a very fine cuppa. Here's his menu: espresso solo or dopiato; macchiato; cappucino (or dopio); mocha; ordinary hot coffee; or espresso with Baileys. Hot or iced.
He also cooks what he calls his koffee kashi (sweets). He describes them as baked custard, but essentially they're canelés – dark and slightly caramel bitter on the outside, nice and moist and yellow inside – which he cooks in cute little cubes in a diminutive oven hidden in a side alcove...
You can buy them singly to have with your coffee, or in stylishly packaged sets of five to take home with you...
And that's it. You stand at the counter while he prepares your coffee. Then when it's ready and dispensed into its cardboard cup, you nurse it standing on the side of the room or retreat to one of the benches in the garden (or carry it back to your office/apartment).
There's just one downside to Omotesando Koffee: it's temporary – and the clock is ticking down. Kunitomo only has this space until the end of the year (when the house is due to be demolished). At least that was the initial arrangment with the owner/landlord. However, there has been such a strong buzz about the place that the owner's agreed to let it continue into next year – and possibly even longer. We've got our fingers crossed...
But even if that does happen, then Kunitomo will just take his coffee machine, his kashi oven and his counter (and that striking steel frame) and find another location.
That's the beauty of his concept – it can be taken anywhere. And if you look at his web site, you can see the list of places where he envisages setting up more of his minimalist coffee shops.
Here's a link to the Omotesando Koffee web site...
UPDATE (June 2013): Another coffee shop that is based on a very similar template to Omotesando Koffee -- thanks to Kunitomo's involvement as producer -- is Café Kitsuné, which opened earlier this year. The menu and style is very similar, with the same cuboid Kashi canelés and a similar blend of old and traditional.
I gave it a short write up in my sweets column in The Japan Times in early May: Custard treats are anything but square
You'll find Café Kitsuné close to Omotesando Station, but on the other side of Aoyama-dori.
Here's a new map link showing both places...
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