Sapporo Cafes: Smooch Coffee Stand

Smooch Coffee looks like a company that has been around for a while in Sapporo, roasting beans and providing coffee to cafes, and since May this year they have there own lovely little coffee shop right next to Nakajima Park. Smooch deals in organic coffee with a link to a Santa Cruz, California based coffee supplier (I think...) and their aesthetic in general is one of sun-bleached, easy-going California chic.

The cafe is in a really nice location. There are only a few seats in there, at a front counter that runs along the window, and it's right across from one of the leafy parts of Nakajima Park. It's a pretty nice, chilled view having a big green park right across from the cafe, and one that you don't get often in Sapporo.

Normally at any independent cafe I wouldn't want to give my opinion on the coffee without trying a real, hot coffee. But hell, I'm wrapping this blog up soon and it's sweltering summer at the moment, so I only got an iced coffee I'm afraid.

But I think iced coffee can tell you a lot about the place too. Most iced coffee tastes terrible, like a cold mockery of that wonderful drink, and it's only very rarely that I find a good iced coffee. But Smooch goes into the very short list of places that do an iced coffee that you might order for a reason other than Japan's hideous summer heat. Also, it's served in a hipster-friendly jar, as you can see.

You can buy all sorts of beans there, the coffee was good, the food (including little cornbread rolls) looked very nice (I want to go back and try it), and if you're looking for a coffee shop around Nakajima it's worth checking out. It's on the map, so go take a look!

Sapporo Cafes: Hammock Base Cafe

Hammocks. Do you like hammocks? Talking about this place with my sister I discovered that she has an irrational hatred of hammocks in cafes. I think it comes from living for too long in areas with a high concentration of cafes that are trying just a little too hard, and, for her, the hammocks have become tainted by their association with annoying people. If, however, you harbour no ill will towards swinging seating then Hammock Base Cafe near Sapporo TV Tower is worth checking out.

In one of those like-attracts-like occurrences, Hammock Base Cafe opened just over a year ago in the basement of the same building that houses the ultra-stylish Fabulous Cafe. Hammock Base Cafe's concept is hammocks, but it's a very cool looking cafe all round with a small menu of handmade dishes and a well stocked bar to boot.

Here's where the good shit is:

Hammocks, son. I think we were actually expecting more traditional... reclining hammocks? Slung-between-two-trees hammocks? These are more like chair things, but if you get yourself properly positioned you can stretch right out and swing around a bit. Just try not to knock over your coffee.

There aren't all that many hammocks so I think that pretty often you'll have to wait before getting to sit in one of those low-slung things. We waited sitting at the bar, which is also impeccably cool. Here it is, through the strings of a hammock.

When the hammocks are free you can go climb in, but if there are people waiting you can only dangle for an hour and a half. We got a slice of meat and potato quiche as a snack. It was good, but small. The guy kept telling us it was small, but when it came it was actually smaller than we expected. It was warm, which I think is possibly a mistake about quiche that is commonly made in Japan, but one for which I am grateful since I don't really like cold quiche.

The drinks come in these cool two-tone light plastic mugs. Almost camping style, which I guess goes with the hammocks and the fake grass underneath them.

The coffee was fine. Nothing to write home about, which I kind of guessed because they only had the one coffee drink on their menu.

Hammock Base has all the other trappings of a creative cafe too: handmade crafts for sale, a weirdly eclectic bookshelf to browse, flyers and posters for all sorts of stuff. It's a good place and I'll head back, even if I'm a little worried about trying to eat while sitting in a hammock. Oh, and motion sickness is a possibility.

As I said, Hammock Base Cafe is under Fabulous Cafe, along with another few cool looking places. The closest station is Bus Centre Mae, and we got there, avoiding the snow, by walking along the long underground passage from Odori Station. I'll mark it on my map, and if you don't hate hammocks it's worth checking out.

Sapporo Cafes: DxM

DxM is one of a chain of quite ridiculously stylish coffee shops in Sapporo run by Morihiko Coffee. These include the beautiful cafe converted from an old wooden house in Maruyama (which I cannot recommend highly enough, even if it is so small it's hard to get a seat a lot of the time) and Atelier Morihiko on the street-car line in West Odori, where I once had an almost transcendentally delicious pear tart. Seriously, I had no idea anything made with pears could be that good.

DxM's concept is to pair the same amazing coffee that Morihiko serve everywhere with luxurious doughnuts by  David (which is, I think, a bakery rather than just some dude named David). The coffee is wonderful and the doughnuts are really fancy, expensive doughnuts. And of course the interior is just excessively stylish, a minimalist collision of industrial trappings and an old school house. That makes it sound a little messy, it's not. The place is a gorgeous combination of metal and wood, and it's not until you look at the chain-link fence and industrial lights, then notice the blackboards and school desks that you realise they've gone for some crazy factory/school approach. But not scary and fascistic like Pink Floyd's The Wall. Y'know, the cool industrial schoolhouse approach.

If you like super-stylish, somewhat expensive coffee places then you have to pay the place a visit. I don't really have a whole lot more to add, except to reiterate that the coffee is really good (they roast their own coffee, and note the hourglass they gave me showing how long to let it brew before pouring it) and that the doughnuts really are fancy.

To be completely honest I don't need my doughnuts this fancy, and just nice hearty Mister Donut doughnuts are fine by me, but it was certainly no hardship at all to eat these ones.

It's pretty close to Sapporo Factory shopping mall and I would guess that the closest subway station would be Bus Centre Mae on the Tozai line. Perhaps a fifteen minute walk from Sapporo Station? Let's say so. I'll put it on my map, so go and try the place for yourself!

Sapporo Cafes: Sarou Houmura

I half-expected Sarou Houmura, a wonderful cafe and gallery in North-East Sapporo, to be in some secluded little glade outside the city. In fact it's about ten minutes from Kanjodori Higashi subway station, in a perfectly normal suburban neighbourhood. The smart architecture of the place though is such that inside you completely forget about the mundane surroundings. Even walking up to the place from the direction of the station it looks just like a pair of anonymous warehouses, and you have to be right on top of the place before you realise what it is.

It's those windows that are the genius point. By setting them all around the cafe part of the building the designer has let plenty of natural light shine in so you don't feel completely cut off from the outside world. At the same time, all you can see is the garden immediately surrounding Houmura, not the more bland buildings of the neighbourhood. It creates the fascinating illusion that you are somewhere far more remote than, in reality, you are. The entrance adds to this feeling as well, that long, winding, high-walled ramp cuts you off from the outside world even before you enter the cafe.

And once you're inside, the cafe part of Sarou Houmura is just the kind of perfect, super-stylish cafe that you can absolutely lose yourself in.

I loved the tables here. I have an unhealthy love of broad, heavy wooden tables, and the ones in Houmura felt like solid, immovable slabs - there for the duration. The chairs too were, I'm pretty confident, the heaviest damn chairs I've ever dealt with in a cafe situation. Holy crap, thank God they were so comfy, because once you were ensconced in one, you couldn't really shuffle it to a more comfortable position. You can probably tell that the whole place was perfectly designed on every level. The toilet was one of those hybrid lavatory/zen retreat deals. Incredible.

All of which is down to the place being owned and run by an artist, Mrs. Houmura, who we recognised from photos as we were browsing around the place after we ate. Connected to the cafe is a gallery space which was showing a range of art by different artists from a local studio when we went. Art is clearly at the heart of Houmura, and there's another building - Shinajina Houmura - just around the corner. That place may be closed for now though, since it looked a little deserted when we walked past. It looks just as cool as the one we went to though, but in a completely different way (there are lots of great photos on the site I linked to, so check it out).

We got a lunch set, ginger pork and lots of great Japanese dishes for 1200 yen including coffee afterwards.

Everything was great, those pickled beansprouts at the top especially, and it was very, very healthy. They do just coffee and drinks too of course, and a 900yen cake set that we saw a bunch of people order, and which seemed to be served on a tile. Painfully cool, which is all the better since the place is run by a little old lady.

I'll mark the place on my map, of course. Like I said it's close to Kanjodori Higashi station on the Toho line, and there's a clear map on the website too.


茶廊法邑（さろうほうむら）

札幌市東区本町1条1丁目8-27

It's open from 10am to 6pm and closed on Tuesdays.

If cool cafes are your thing it's definitely worth a trip, and it's always nice to find interesting things on the Toho line because, I'll be honest, I don't know many. Perhaps I should challenge myself to find some more.

Sapporo Cafes - Kenon

A bit too far to be of use to most people, this one. Still, their bagels and donuts were just heavenly and if you live in the North of Sapporo, or better yet in Shin-Kotoni, then it's nice to know there are nice places around. Right?

Kenon is a stylish little place in a very suburban part of Northern Sapporo that clearly knows its target market is mums and housewives. They had mother's magazines and I'm pretty sure that they're a very 'baby friendly' place considering there were two very young babies while we were there. So it's not a hipster hang-out, but it is very minimal and chic, and really stands out in the area it's in.

It has a small cafe space attached, but I think that Kenon's main thing is baking bagels and donuts for take-out. And they're damn good bagels and donuts, let me tell you. We had chicken and salmon bagel sandwiches, amazing filled donuts and I got a herb sausage bagel to take away that turned out to be a bagel with a whole sausage running through it. It was all seriously good stuff and strongly recommended.

The coffee was good and the people were super friendly. As I said it's probably too far out for anyone to justify the trip out there, but if you're in the area it's great to know about. I've stuck it on my map... here.

Sapporo Food: Ease Cafe

Ease Cafe stuck in my head with some strange, delayed-reaction device attached to it. About ten minutes after it was suggested that we go there, and after I'd said 'yeah, sure, anywhere's good' it suddenly clicked that I knew the place, that I'd gone past it a bunch of times and noted - oooh, looks like a cozy cafe. Shame it's not exactly central.

There is however, a very good reason for its location - in that the place is on the ground floor of what looks like a ruddy great student dorm. I don't get the impression that it's exclusively the stomping ground of students, but I'm guessing they more than help the place stay afloat.

Inside it's relaxing and welcoming in that... kinda stock contemporary-rustic feel kinda way. That sounds both damning and snooty, but it's meant as neither - just saying that there is a style that a lot of small independent cafes kinda go for. That style of decor and atmosphere works really well for the most part, and is certainly infinitely preferable to the place we ended up in last week which... I mean I didn't write about it for a reason. Yuki's comment was that she didn't know what part of the place she would change first, since absolutely everything was horrible. Ease Cafe isn't like that at all, everything is great, the interior is perfectly executed and since the only thing I'd change would be the lounge covers of punk and new wave songs they were playing, and which I'm sick of, I guess I wouldn't really change anything at all.

They look to have won some kinda local coffee award, which made me regret not ordering something fancy. The blend coffee I got with my meal was fine, but nothing special. I think they build up to special. That said, it's worth bearing in mind that the coffee at almost any independent shop is better than anything you'll get at any of the standard chain shops, and this was no exception. We both got chicken something, which was their recommended dish and which was pretty great.

It's rice and chicken and someother stuff mixed up with some cheese and demi-glace sauce and was perfect for the miserable rainy weather we were escaping from. It looks like they're awfully proud of their range of pancakes, so I'd say you really ought to try those if you go. I would've loved to but I was kinda full.

Ease Cafe is thoroughly recommended as another preferable alternative to all those chain stores. It's a little far North of the city centre, but you should go there if you're in the neighbourhood. It's on the map, so you can do just that.

Sapporo Cafes: Cafe Sahabi

Ugh, I thought I wasn't going to write this thing anymore! Look, the whole place is so dirty I'm going to have to clean everything up before I actually get back to blogging. Or I can just pile the lot in the sink I guess...

Well y'know, don't blog because you have to, blog because you want to. Words to that effect.

I stumbled over Cafe Sahabi randomly one time, and have dragged a few people there for the coffee, the amazing donuts and the atmosphere. Here are two of those people:


Ignore them. Pleasant though they may be to look at, the cafe is the point. It's a retro-styled cave of pop-culture ephemera with the standard manga library, several cabinets worth of characters and action figures, heaps of CDs and even an old NES you can play. It's a little tricky to find I guess. I've marked it on the map, but it's inside the building on the ground floor, not actually facing onto the street. There's a sign outside with a camel on though, it should be easy to spot and it's well worth the trip if you don't mind spending a little more for your coffee and actually enjoying the experience. It's pretty central too, just a couple of blocks off Eki-mae Dori next to Tanuki Koji

And they make fresh donuts, really fucking good fresh donuts. Donuts that make you think - mmmm, Mister Donut donuts are just donuts. These are Donuts. They're really good.


Matt got some kind of paprika based rice-bowl dish which he said was good but small (which is par for the course at this kind of place). I myself have only tried the donuts and can, as above, recommend them thoroughly. The drinks are served in "Fire-King" mugs, which I guess must be something of a big deal since it's mentioned on the menu. I'm not sure if it makes the coffee taste better, but it certainly helps you caffeinate in style:


Mmmm, retro-tastic. So, if yer in Odori and want a coffee that isn't from a chain (frankly it goes without saying that the coffee here, while not spectacular, is better than any chain I can think of... could have done with a little more though) I really recommend this place. We stumbled in there after wandering around the Snow Festival in a -10 blizzard and it was a little bit like heaven.

Sapporo Food: FAB Cafe

Oh man, I'm up to date again! I just posted the last five days in one long, rambling splurge. Enjoy!

FAB Cafe is a nice cafe in East Odori, Sapporo. I can't really rave about it too much, but every time I've been there the food's been good and the atmosphere is really nice. They sell some second hand books and furniture outside, and some cool looking homeware stuff inside too.


It's near a bunch of interesting and fancy clothes shops like Acoustic Rock, Cream Soda, and that terrifying one where the walls all seem to be marked out but not filled in and everything costs half a month's salary. Here I am tucking into a fine plate of pasta:


My biggest complaint with FAB Cafe is that I'm often lured into trying their fancy, fancy coffees by the mouthwatering descriptions, only to find them sorely lacking. That also means I've never just ordered a black coffee there, so I can't really speak for the quality of their "black gold", which is something that's usually really important to me.

It's on the map yo.

Sapporo Food: Jetset

Jetset is one of those ultra-stylish, design-centric cafes that seamlessly integrate coffee, light food, so-so chill-out music and a small imported stationery store into one trendy little package. These kind of places aren't without their flaws (they're expensive, and when your food or coffee sucks all the design flair in the world can't help you really), but Jetset has been here for a while apparently and it was pretty great.


Jetset's stylistic palette is a very 1960s, mod-on-a-concorde one. They have many euro-centric art and design books and lots of very classy european stationery. I am an actual European (I know, I know, but I try not to let it go to my head) so it wasn't all that special, ("Oh, London? Yeah, been there.") but it looked very nice. One thing places like this really need, is to be very nice to hang-out in for a while, and it was awesome to chill upstairs in one of those window seats and watch people go by on a chilly Sunday afternoon. They even have one of those stunning bubble chairs that I would kill a minor royal for:


You can't sit in it. Of course.

The coffee was good, but not spectacular (I've always got high hopes for places like this, that they might be real coffee obsessives). The food was surprisingly good though. I wasn't waiting with bated breath (I'm not a fan of open-face sandwiches where they pop-up in a non Pete & Pete setting) but the open-face BLT below was really, really tasty.


Yuki's nasi goreng on the right was a bit tasteless apparently, but still I wasn't expecting much and I was pleasantly surprised. It's not like you're going there for a hearty supper anyway, so if you want some good light food, good coffee, and expensive european stationery in a very cool setting I'd recommend the place.

I want Raymond Chandler to tell me more about coffee

From The Long Goodbye:


That's a man who knows his coffee.

Coffee Inna Can

Of course in Japan canned coffee is really popular. Vending machines are everywhere and in summer you can get cold canned coffee, in winter you can get hot canned coffee. Conventional wisdom amongst westerners is that coffee in a can tastes shit - but conventional wisdom is wrong.

It tastes shit only most of the time. Sometimes it tastes alright. Y'know, ok I mean.

My choice at the moment is Fire: Africa, which I buy a can of on the way to work every day. I also quite like most of the Itoen line, which are sold at the vending machine right outside where I work, especially when they're heated up for winter. Sadly my other options right outside my building are Georgia, which is Coke's stake in the market and which I don't like much.

Which makes it even more galling to find this:

Click through and check it out, there's a whole story line played out over the course of 4 or 5 commercials. But, much as I hate to disagree with Coop, it isn't damn fine coffee.

Leonard Foujita

Man, I love it when I got into a coffee shop, order a coffee, and while I'm sitting drinking that coffee, they bring me more coffee for free. That's the kinda thing that'll make you love a place, and they've done that three times now when I've been in the Japanese coffee chain Tully's in Odori. On one level Tully's is just another chain coffee store, but their coffee is better than Starbucks, and I find it much less objectionable going there when I'm in one of the big shopping areas. Plus, y'know, free coffee.

This weekend I went to see the Leonard Foujita retrospective at Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art. I love modern art, and I love art galleries, but with the best will in the world Sapporo is not well served for them. Oh well, I guess the general awesomeness makes up for it.


Foujita seems to have been a prolific and interesting artist. He moved from Japan to France in the 20s and hung out with Modigliani (I would say, with my professional art-critic's gaze, that the examples of his early work here did look like Modigliani) and became an established and respected figure in the European art community. He later travelled all over the world, married several times, and at some point changed his name to Leonard and converted to Christianity.

From a quick browse on the web it looks like Foujita painted many, many pictures, and moved through quite a few phases in his career which made the retrospective very interesting, even if at times I plain didn't like his paintings. The exhibition's centrepiece was a massive piece recently discovered and restored from his... I guess middle period. It's a fun story, it was considered lost for many years but found in a Paris warehouse and restored. However that period, and earlier in what seems to have been the period when he made his name... really not to my tastes:


I am unmoved by the pearlescent luminosity of their skin. There was one mural that I felt was really pretty terrible. However the earlier pictures when he was finding his way were interesting, and he seems to have painted the only interesting pictures of cats I've ever seen. Paintings of cats are usually a pet hate of mine, but these were great. And later in his career I would say he was a hell of a painter no matter what your tastes, his faces became deliberately stylised in a really interesting way, and he started using these eerie children that look both fully-formed and painted from memory at the same time. His paintings started exploding with colour and he really started pursuing his Christian faith through painting, decorating a chapel and making paintings of the adoration, the apocalypse, the descent from the cross and so on.

It's great to see an artist's career like this, and considering I couldn't read any of the information boards (which were helpfully in Japanese and French) it all came across pretty clearly. I didn't know anything about him before, but I'd recommend the exhibition if you can make it to Sapporo Japan before it finishes on... um... Thursday.

The Three Pilliars of Western Civilization: Coffee, Rock and Wrestling

I really started to love coffee a few years ago, so this is the first of probably many posts about that dark, heady mistress. Coffee. During the week it's fuel, and my tristes with coffee are perfunctory and business like. But on the weekend I like to really spend some time with coffee, you know, lavish some attention on it. Oh coffee... come here you...

So I keep track of places here that serve good coffee, and believe me that'll be a whole series of posts in the future. While the coffee boom took root in Japan just as much as it did everywhere else, coffee here probably isn't as good as the States or Europe overall, and finding great, strong coffee isn't all that easy.

But anyway, as well as looking for coffee in the real world, I keep my antenna up online, so I immediately noted a fun story in the Guardian that Megadeth frontman (or as I like to think of him, former Metallica guitarist) Dave Mustaine had launched his own blend of coffee.

What are you waiting for?

But not only that, it seems that while Mustaine gets the column inches, he's only one side of this currently three-headed hydra, as you can also get your buzz-buzz on with the help of former WCW and WWE wrestler Goldberg, and Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante.

That was the point that I realised I had to post this, because if I don't then Bunny will, and I'll have been scooped by my own sister. As it is: Hey Bunny! Goldberg has his own coffee and it's called Jackhammer Java!

I really wanted to find a review of some of these blends from independant sources, but the best I could find online was a bunch of people going "Dave Mustaine's got his own coffee! Sweet!" or "Dave Mustaine's got his own coffee! Fffnnnaaar!" Which means I'm sorely tempted to try them myself, although they are a bit dear. Anyway there's plenty of hilarity to be had by clicking around the Legends Cup Coffee store, so go right ahead, but to be honest I don't think the concept of Dave Mustaine's Coffee is all that ridiculous. Guy likes coffee I guess.

Dave Mustaine's Decaf Coffee though? That is fucking hysterical.