Iolite Coffee Roasters

Daisuke Yoshida trained at a home roasting shop in Tokyo before returning to Kyoto in 2020 to open Iolite inside his grandfather's old wagashiya, a traditional sweets shop, keeping its cedar beam ceiling intact rather than covering it over. He judges a roast by tracking its aroma from start to finish, protecting the sweetness and acidity on light roasts and pulling back from heaviness on dark ones, aiming for a coffee's own potential rather than a fixed house style. His wife Shizuka runs the kitchen, best known for a mocha roll cake finished with coffee cream and cacao nibs.

The bar rotates roughly six single origins at a time through hand drip alongside espresso on a La Marzocco Linea, with twenty seats split across four tops and two tops in a room that takes walk-ins only. The shop takes its name from iolite, a gem sailors once used to navigate by, and Yoshida runs it with the same idea in mind, one fixed point for regulars to find their way back to in a city thick with tourist cafes.