Cafe de l'Ambre

Ichiro Sekiguchi opened this room in 1948 under the name Alkaloid Beverage Institute, at a time when fresh green coffee was nearly impossible to find in Japan, and built his early menu around a decade old batch of Sumatra Mandheling he managed to track down. That scarcity turned into the shop's defining idea, coffee beans aged deliberately for years before roasting, some of them for decades, a practice almost nobody else in the country still keeps up.

Coffee is still the only thing on the menu here, poured into vintage china and tall champagne glasses rather than mugs, hand roasted onsite and brewed through cloth filters the way Sekiguchi set the recipe up decades ago. The Amber Queen, a chilled coffee built with caramel and unsweetened condensed milk, remains the drink most people order first, alongside a short list of coffee based desserts including a firm, not overly sweet coffee jelly.