One of the things I read about while getting ready for our vacation in Japan were these famous tiny businesses: bars or izakayas with four seats, narrow little bookstores or record shops in people’s houses or the bottom floors of small buildings, hyper-specialized or themed bars owned by one passionate guy. (There’s one that’s chock-full of Star Wars memorabilia, for example.)
We got to visit a couple of such places, and saw many more from the street. I’m planning to write a longer, more thematic piece on all of this, on the vibrant business and street culture in Japanese cities and the seemingly very, very low barriers to entry for regular people to participate. Today I’m showing you one of these businesses.
In Kyoto, before an afternoon of doing tourist stuff, we wanted to get a cup of coffee at a local coffee shop. Luckily it was after 10am, when many coffee shops open—coffee is common in Japan, but it doesn’t seem to be a grab-one-on-the-way-to-work thing. There are a lot of lovely, leisurely cafes that at least try to lean into the craft of coffee, though of course the quality can be uneven (we had no bad coffee, but one or two were really good).
I simply searched “coffee” on Google Maps, and this one place popped up a few blocks away. I knew from the photo of the building that this was the one I wanted to try.
This is the shop. I am standing on the street here:
And in the driveway here:
It isn’t quite as tiny as it looks, because it extends left between the buildings in front and back of it. This is the little corridor behind it:
This is literally a small shack in someone’s driveway, between the street and their house, which serves as a little one-man business. In the daytime, obviously, it’s a coffee shop. In the evening, however, it becomes a bar, with some basic beer and whisky offerings. (It’s much easier to sell alcohol in Japan than in America.)
We ordered two different beans/roasts, from a little detailed menu of different offerings. The owner/barista measured and ground our beans to order, and while he made our pour-overs (pour-over appears to be more common in Japanese cafes than espresso) I observed the very old coffee grinder, just for display, which if I remember correctly had a nameplate for a predecessor company to Panasonic.
There wasn’t a lot of space inside, maybe enough to fit 12 people max, but it felt spacious.
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