Today in Kyoto, you can experience a tea ceremony while staying at the Hiiragiya ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn), immerse yourself in a young artist’s interpretation of tea at Rust Sabi on the dramatically designed top floor of a hidden clothing store, order a pot of nicha (bean tea) to accompany smoky kyobancha (green tea) cookies at the stylish Café Malda, and get what Mangan says is the city’s best matcha soft serve at Marukyu Koyamaen’s Nishinotoin branch. You can take a train a few stops to Uji and visit Tsuen, Japan’s oldest teahouse. And of course, you can buy much of what you see to bring home.

However modern or casual the presentation may be at some teahouses, the roots are always visible. No wonder that when Copenhagen’s Noma had a pop-up in Kyoto for 10 weeks in the spring of 2023, they spent over a year sourcing teas from the region. According to Carolyne Lane, who heads the restaurant’s infusions, Noma worked with a multigenerational tea farm just outside the city to develop a special harvest, which was blended with spring plum blossom and caterpillar fungus, while another farmer provided them with every part of a tree, from the bark to the flower to the leaf, for another of the nine infusions on offer. And that didn’t include the tea used in the food itself.

Tearoom Tōka

To book the tea service at Tearoom Tōka is to commit yourself to a journey — a highly choreographed performance of subtle gestures that culminates not only in an unforgettable cup of green tea but a shift in perception when it comes to the power of ritual to transform your daily life. Created by Kyoto-born culinary consultant Fumie Okumura and her husband, the gallerist Elmar Weinmayr, the tearoom is a highly considered addition to the front of a house built for a painter a century ago. Six chairs line a counter carved from native horse chestnut, behind which the wall’s blue fabric fades to gray. Servers heat a formidable brass kettle and present each guest with vials of tea to sniff like perfume. The winelike descriptions on the tea menu skew toward connoisseurs, heralding, say, a hybrid grown without fertilizer, or “the first harvest of the asatsuyu cultivar originating in Uji that has almost disappeared from the market,” which tastes of muscat. After experiencing this slow-motion ballet, the desire to take home the tools, tastes, and movements nearly overwhelms. Luckily, the artisan-crafted teaware is available for sale in the adjoining gallery. You didn’t know you needed a wooden tea canister with craftsmanship so refined over centuries that, when the seams are aligned, the lid glides down to close itself with barely a push.

Ippodo

Ippodo is the perfect teahouse for those craving a simpler introduction to Kyoto teas. The seventh-generation tea merchant, helmed by the Watanabe family, has its flagship on one of the city’s best streets for antiques. At the front counter, you can shop for their green-tea varietals: matcha, sencha, fine gyokuro, and roasted hōjicha, and the Kyoto favorite: iribancha, also known as kyobancha, which is a powerfully flavored tea made from smoking the clippings of tea trees, branches and all. Ippodo also sells mugicha, or roasted barley tea, one of the only caffeine-free teas hearty enough to stand up to milk and sugar. In the adjoining Kaboku Tearoom, those teas are served with a twist. “We’ll provide simple guidance, while the customers brew the teas themselves!” says Watanabe. “There was a perception of tea as an expensive thing served to you at hotels and lounges by kimono-clad waitresses. Our idea was different: We wanted to simply focus on the taste of the tea itself.”

Watanabe’s goal is to teach people the pleasure of enjoying tea in their everyday lives so they can bring these lessons home. Guests to the spare space are guided through the first steep, with a timer placed on the table, and served lovely seasonal wagashi, or sweets. For the subsequent steeps, the guests are on their own, tasting how the teas evolve. “I hope that they are able to have little revelations about tea, like, ‘Huh, so that’s what tea really tastes like?’” says Watanabe. Matcha is also an education, served in two styles: First is the intensely thick, ceremonial-style koicha. Then the server adds water to the last sip and whisks it into a thinner usucha-style matcha.

The real discovery here is going through the flavor looking-glass that is gyokuro. The green tea is costly and highly prized thanks to the way it is farmed; the plants are shaded with straw for 20 days before the first delicate spring buds are harvested. The buildup of chlorophyll results in a flavor that is shockingly savory, until it mellows into light sweetness. Being shown how to get the water temperature and timing just right is essential to enjoying this tea. (Purists will want to fill up a few bottles with Kyoto’s soft water, said to be some of Japan’s best, from one of the city’s many wells, for future brewing.)