Published April 9th 2018 on the former blog
Blue Bottle founder James Freeman has always had an obsession with Japan. You can see his love for the culture in the Japanese flower arrangements (Ikebana) that can be found in every shop in the Bay Area as well as everything they sell in the store being from Japan. “Anybody who’s known me more than a few minutes knows I’m very deeply inspired by the old-fashioned coffee shops of Japan, and in Tokyo particularly,” he admits in an interview.
On March 23rd Blue Bottle opened it’s first shop outside of Tokyo in the old capital Kyoto in a quite street close to the Nanzen-ji temple. Similar to %Arabica, they picked a beautiful 100-year old town house (machiya) and renovated it into a cafe with 44 seats and a courtyard.
They also offer exclusive items to the location such as green tea mint cookies which makes sense considering Matcha was born in Kyoto (read more about it on this post).
