Why go
Bean, barista, guest
A barista asks first how the coffee will be made at home. Eiichi Kunitomo, founder and barista at Koffee Mameya Kakeru in Tokyo, built the room around that exchange, with the cup treated as a result of preference, equipment, bean, and method rather than a fixed house style. His earlier work crossed Osaka and Italy, two coffee cultures with different ideas of pace, service, and flavor. Since 2018, at Koffee Mameya in Tokyo, he has organized specialty coffee around clarity: the bean named plainly, the brewing choice explained directly, the guest brought close enough to read what is happening without being smothered by tasting shorthand. Kakeru followed in 2021 in Koto, near Kiyosumi-shirakawa, as the wider expression of that discipline. Kunitomo keeps the bar away from loose romance. His own line on coffee language is useful here: “It’s not easy to understand ‘hint of lemon’ and that kind of thing.” At Kakeru, the answer is not to make coffee simpler. It is to make the path to it more exact.
Courses built from the bean outward
The program works less like a conventional café menu than a coffee tasting sequence. Cold brew, milk brew, lattes, mocktails, and coffee cocktails carry the same material through different temperatures, textures, and levels of dilution, with confections placed beside the cup when the course asks for sweetness. Cheesecake, chocolate terrine, and gelato belong to that frame, not as a pastry case aside but as pairings folded into the rhythm of service. One cited cocktail by Akira Zushi makes the range visible: milk brew blended with hop-accented jasmine tea and lemon, then finished with prickly ash water. The gesture is cocktail work, but the center stays coffee. The bar also extends beyond the counter. Guests can leave with a hand-written brewing recipe shaped to their own equipment, a small transfer of bench-side method into the kitchen at home. Kunitomo’s discipline sits in that adjustment: the same bean, read through another grinder, kettle, filter, or habit.
Oak, stone, and a three-sided counter
The room gives the work very little noise to hide behind. Koffee Mameya Kakeru sits in a renovated warehouse in Shirakawa, with an interior by art director Tomohiro Kato and architect Yosuke Hayashi. A large oak structure holds the coffee shelves, and a rectangular wooden frame encloses a three-sided stone counter. The arrangement makes the barista’s station visible from more than one angle; the hands are part of the service, not theater added afterward. Custom Ehime ceramic mugs add another layer of intent. Their handles are cornered rather than curved, and the interior is convex, a form likened to a wine glass for the way aroma moves in a tighter space. The room stays calm, modern, and close. Conversation can continue, but the counter sets the tempo.
A clearer language for coffee
Kakeru matters because it tests how far a specialty coffee bar can go without losing the guest to abstraction. Kunitomo invites range, including visiting baristas and roasters from Japan and abroad, but the house keeps returning to legibility: what the bean is, how it has been brewed, why this pairing sits beside it. If the next movement here is already present, it is in that home-brewing recipe, folded and carried out after the final cup at Koffee Mameya Kakeru.
