History of the restaurant

Today I’d like to introduce one restaurant that serves food and drinks that incorporate Japanese tea as ingredients. The restaurant serves a wide range of Japanese tea such as Green tea, Barley tea, Hojicha, Matcha, etc. The restaurant opened in 2014 as a main dining of Hotel Ryumeikan Ochanomizu Honten which originally started in 1899 during the Meiji era. Not too far from the current Ochanomizu station, there used to be a temple called “Korinji” where a pure and clear water from natural spring was dedicated to Tokugawa Shogun for a tea ceremony. The story was believed to be the origin of the name of the station, “Ochanomizu” (i.e. “Cha” means tea in Japanese). The restaurant values the history of the area where people enjoy a good, relaxing tea time, and made the tea their concept of the restaurant.

About the restaurant

The restaurant is on the fist floor of Hotel Ryumeikan Ochanomizu Honten located in Ochanomizu, Tokyo, and operates as a café in the afternoon and turns into a tea cuisine restaurant for dinner. Their signature drink menu is beer with various tea flavors (e.g. Green tea beer, Hojicha beer, etc.). It looks like a vegetable smoothie outside but the bitterness of beer and green tea perfectly match with each other and somehow, the bitterness of the beer or green tea disappears when you drink. The green is known for its health benefits such as vitamin C, green tea catechin, and green tea theanine, which means green tea beer is much healthier than the regular beer. All the food menu also incorporates green tea in a dish, either as a seasoning, sauce, or paste, etc. Please check out the website below and also the food that I had the other day with some photos.

https://1899.jp/ochanomizu/en/