A humorous thing has happened in high-end coffee in a final few years: The righteous fight on divert and sugar, waged for like a decade, has solemnly ended. Not everywhere, not all during once, yet now even a fanciest, many immoderate shops are flattering chill about it, generally if it’s done with a complicated wink or with a amply high-minded set of ingredients (e.g., “distilled with hibiscus, jarred with strawberry thai basil cordial”).
This isn’t utterly what Sawada Coffee is doing, yet it’s useful context for deliberation a latte-focused Chicago import, that has arrived in New York with a “modern diner” Au Cheval in Tribeca. Named for its owner Hiroshi Sawada, a skateboarding latte art champion, a emporium translates some of a sensibility of Sawada’s Streamer Coffee cafes in Tokyo and Osaka, yet with a complicated sip of personal branding — a resounding picture of Sawada looms over a whole space, that occupies a run of Au Cheval, and his physiognomy peers out from skateboard decks pinned to a dim timber walls.
The coffee during Sawada is roasted domestically by Metropolis in Chicago, in a character that competence be loosely described as Tokyo dim — representation black, yet it never manages to cranky a threshold into acrid, like many American dim roasts, that make your throat feel like it’s being scraped out into an ashtray. (If we don’t know what I’m articulate about, try whatever Starbucks dim fry is handy, yet though divert or sugar. Which, some people like that feeling in their coffee, and that’s fine!)
Put another way, a Sawada coffee is immature and smoky, yet intensely smoothed out. While it’s a relatively common character in Japan, from a many ancient Cafe De L’Ambre and Chatei Hatou to a some-more modern Bear Pond Coffee, I’ve never found anyone domestically doing dim roasting utterly this way, that is to say, not terribly. And in truth, we generally find it preferable to a character of espresso that ruled New York via a aughts and early 2010s, that was intensely dense, bone dry, roughly gritty, sweet-tart sour.
Still, during Sawada, we should substantially hang to a divert drinks for that black-hole-dark coffee is matched (I meant we know, imo, do you), and generally speaking, a some-more contaminated drinks are a best. Nothing is utterly so antique as what’s on offer in Sawada’s Streamer shops in Japan, that stays a sequence for next-level assembled coffee drinks — we so wish Sawada offering the lush divert bottle drinks we can get during Streamer — yet there are standouts in New York: a signature troops latte, done with matcha and dusted with cocoa powder, and a black camo latte, done with hojicha, a roasted immature tea.
Neither should utterly work, yet they do, and a hojicha-powered black camo latte is a improved of a dual — concurrently eccentric and floral, yet being too sweet, yet a splash has a firmness to it you’ll substantially wish to equivocate when it’s quite prohibited outside. You can also supplement kuromitsu, a Japanese black sugarine syrup, to any splash (it’s described as “Tokyo style” on a menu). But it is a blast of sweetness, and it obliterated a cappuccino, so you’ll substantially wish to hang to adding it to drinks with a lot of divert volume, like an iced latte.
Coffee in New York has been mostly stagnant for a final few years — a conditions that’s proven gainful to a invasive class famous as the Aussie cafe — in no tiny partial since pornographic rents have prevented a kind of innovation that done a LA stage so widespread over a final few years (although as lease catches adult there, that epoch is entrance to a close). So Sawada, while not for everyone, is one of a many honestly desirous additions to a New York coffee stage in some time. And as a waves of specialty lattes rises — charcoal, maple, whatever this is — it’s transparent that a subsequent era will demeanour a small some-more Sawada, with a crafted coffee splash combos, and a small reduction like a stern shops that ruled New York in a aughts. For improved or for worse.
Matt Buchanan is Eater’s executive editor.