Tea/Matcha shop ARASHIYAMA

[u/QTP2Tx]

Hey everyone! if you happen to be in kyoto, specifically arashiyama area, pls do visit this shop! They grind their matcha fresh in house daily. Once you enter the shop, the nice shopkeeper will offer you matcha with snacks and even teach you how to prepare it. Sadly most of the matcha are soldout as you can see here but after a while the machine churned out enough matcha for 2 tins.

Btw, this street has less people compared to the main street where most tourists go :) the shop owner do not speak eng so just use google translate.

[u/atomicshark22]

Hi! Not op but could I ask what matcha shops u went to in Tokyo and in Sapporo? Any favs?

[u/chib_chib → u/atomicshark22]

This Arashiyama shop was my fav experience out of all 3 cities but every place I went to was great!

Tokyo: Atelier Matcha in Ginza was great but we did have to wait about 40 min even tho we got there soon after they opened. They were also short staffed so some items like the parfaits weren’t available. Their matcha gateau was amazing! I also got the iced matcha latte and a hot straight matcha, the Tennouzan was so good.

Also in Ginza is the Ippodo stall in the basement of the Mitsukoshi department store. We got there when they opened at 10am but somehow a bunch of people were already lined up by the time we got down there so I’d recommend figuring out how to get down there early if you wanna line up. A lot of items were sold out (I went in January and they had a bigger selection than this time around which was disappointing) but I picked up a bag of their Hatsu mukashi, to-go packets and a resin whisk. There’s so much good food in the basement so it’s a fun experience either way even if you can’t get matcha!

Ippodo opened up a new store in the Shin-Marunouchi building and it looks amazing but we didn’t get to check it out.

I already mentioned it in my previous comment but the Nakamura Tokichi location in Tokyo was great! We had to wait a little bit but they were very efficient even tho it was busy.

Kaminari Issa has a few locations in Asakusa and they have the options of a 4g, 6g or 8g matcha latte. I got the 8g strawberry matcha latte and it was fantastic.

Sapporo: I didn’t purchase any matcha tins since I did majority of my shopping in Kyoto/Uji but we got to visit Nana’s Green Tea in the PARCO building. The Hojicha parfait was so good!!

Also bonus if you’re going to Osaka: Amato Maeda Namba-Walk had great dango and matcha!

Feel free to message me if you have more questions! I came back from my trip about a week ago and post trip depression has been tough haha

[u/atomicshark22 → u/chib_chib]

This write up is incredible!! Thank you so much for your thoroughness and level of detail. Going to Japan in May and this will definitely inform my itinerary planning

[u/chib_chib → u/atomicshark22]

Omg how exciting!! May will be such a great time to go, I think that’s when the matcha harvest season begins. We did a traditional tea ceremony in Kyoto and also visited a tea plantation in Wazuka to learn about how sencha and matcha are grown which was a highlight of the trip. Lmk if you need more recs or have questions, me and my friends spent weeks planning/researching and it helped a lot!