I remember a time when people drank matcha mostly because they were studying the Japanese tea ceremony.
Chado classes felt like a cultural cult - members kneeling on tatami, ritualistically whisking and partaking of a green powder in a choreography vaguely reminiscent of a Catholic Mass.
Now, matcha has gone mainstream and, no matter how much the purists protest, matcha latte - complete with animal-shaped foam art - is on track for world domination.
Matcha in Kyoto: From Uji Fields to Global Feeds
Before there were parfaits higher than your head, there was just tea - leaves, monks and a lot of patience.
Eisai, the monk who founded Kyoto's first Zen temple, brought tea seeds back from China in 1191, promoting the beverage as a cure for ailments. In the temples, tea came to be served both as an offering and as meditation fuel for sleepy monks.
The town of Uji in southern Kyoto prefecture became the stage where this leafy drama took root. Farmers there perfected the art of oishita saibai - shading tea plants for weeks before harvest. This extra step increased the sweetness and umami of the leaves which, once steamed and stone-ground, became a rich, vibrantly green matcha powder.
Given its proximity to a premier tea-producing area as well as its status as the imperial capital, it was no accident that Kyoto became, and remains, one of the centers of Japanese tea culture.
Fast forward a few centuries and retail caught up with ritual, introducing a variety of tea sweets and innovative matcha products that ranged from cosmetics to curry.
Meanwhile, Uji continued to produce matcha. Alongside Kyoto, it became shorthand for premium matcha.
This dovetailed with a domestic and international craze that can be traced back to the launch of Häagen-Dazs' matcha ice cream in 1996, Starbucks’ introduction of its green tea latte in 2006 and Instagram’s obsession with neon-green soft serve in the mid-2010s.
Today, exports of Japanese green tea have hit record highs and supply shortages have forced some retailers to suspend sales. Other shops have resorted to limiting customers to one matcha item at a time - if there are stocks in the first place.
But Kyoto remains the place to enjoy matcha, whether in traditional Japanese tea houses or in modern cafes where Western sweets are infused with matcha.
The city's centuries-old tea shops and historic tea houses handle queues that looked more like iPhone launches than serene cultural exchanges but people continue to stand in line.
And yet I remember a time - those good ol' tea cult days - when matcha was served to chado newbies with trepidation. What if the guests complained that the tea was bitter? What if they...left it undrunk?
Explaining that this was the tea used in traditional tea ceremonies would hardly have counted as service recovery - more likely, seppuku with a tea scoop would have been in order.
So why does the world love matcha now?
Why Matcha Went Mainstream
First, the flavor. Matcha’s signature taste - earthy with a hint of bitterness and a lot of umami - behaves like a mellow adult in a dessert bar. Put it next to cream, white chocolate or sweet red bean paste and it doesn’t fight; it harmonizes. That sweet–bitter balance is exactly what makes matcha desserts feel 'grown-up' rather than sugar-bomb childish.
Second, the color. This isn’t pastel green. This is eye-catching, algorithm-pleasing, jade-to-neon 'did a tree just become dessert?' green - the kind of hue that turns a matcha soft serve into a social media celebrity before you even taste it.
Third, the wellness aura. Because you drink the whole leaf (green tea leaves are pulverized into powder), a cup of matcha is dense with catechins and L-theanine, an amino acid that increases your focus and helps you to relax without becoming drowsy. This 'calm energy' reputation fits neatly into wellness routines.
Fourth, cultural cachet. Two brand moments nudged matcha from niche to normal: the debut of Häagen-Dazs' matcha ice cream in Japan and Starbucks rolling out matcha drinks across world markets. Those launches mainstreamed the flavor, then social media did the rest.
A Field Guide to Matcha Treats
If you’re visiting Kyoto, try the local tea but save room for the green buffet. From classic tea house sweets to modern café inventions, here are some of the matcha confections you’ll find across Kyoto and Uji.
- Matcha Parfait: Tall glasses layered with sponge cake, kanten jelly, ice cream, shiratama dumplings, azuki bean paste, whipped cream and wafers. Dig deep and you may hit candied chestnuts, popped rice or even a streak of jam.
- Matcha Ice Cream: Comes in varying levels of sweetness and matcha intensity.
- Matcha Tiramisu and Cake: Whipped cream and mascarpone cozy up to green tea.
- Matcha Mochi and Daifuku: Chewy rice flour clouds dusted with green tea powder. The bean paste filling may also be flavored with matcha.
- Matcha Warabi Mochi: Bracken starch jelly cloaked in matcha instead of the usual roasted soybean powder.
- Matcha Jelly: Wobbly kanten cubes with a restrained sweetness. Great if you want sweets but also plan to climb to the top of Fushimi Inari shrine later.
- Matcha Cookies, Chocolates and Financiers: Good Kyoto souvenirs, provided you don’t eat them all on the train before Kyoto Station fades from view.
- Matcha Soba Noodles: Not dessert but Kyoto insists.
The versatility of matcha helps to explain its popularity as an ingredient. It gels, foams, bakes, swirls and dusts - which is why the list of modern matcha desserts keeps growing across Japan and beyond.
Kyoto's Best Matcha Dessert Cafes
Kyoto offers matcha spots aplenty - and that may actually be a problem for matcha lovers who have only a few days in the city. The real challenge isn’t finding matcha but deciding which cafés to visit. And that's why a guide to Kyoto’s best matcha sweets feels less like a blog post and more like a resident's civic duty.
The mission focused on matcha parfaits and cake because kakigori deserves its own summer novella and the matcha ice cream crowd will need a separate pilgrimage guide.
The competition was stiff and the judging severely over-caffeinated. But I managed to narrow the selection down to three winners based on the following criteria: taste, of course, but also presentation, choice of utensils, café design and atmosphere, as well as the service, all of which affect the matcha experience.
Motoan Tea House (Marukyu Koyamaen)
If you’re going to entrust your daily calorie and caffeine allowance to roll cake and tea, it might as well be with one of the most respected names in the trade.
Marukyu Koyamaen, tea purveyor since 1704, has supplied high-quality matcha to temples and tea masters for generations. Their Motoan tea house is the public face of this heritage: part retail outlet, part café, part traditional tea room.
The café offers a wide range of Uji tea. If you'd like to have a traditional matcha experience, start with koicha - matcha so thick it's almost a paste - then move on to the lighter usucha.
Matcha isn’t the only draw here; the infused green teas, sencha, are also excellent.
The sweets menu is as traditional as you’d expect - wagashi dominates, with only two Western confections available.
Choosing between the baum kuchen and the roll cake - both flavored with matcha, of course - is a dilemma that takes time to resolve.
If you opt for the roll cake, you'll be rewarded with cloud-like softness - fuwa-fuwa is the technical Japanese term - delicate sweetness and cream that's rich but not cloying. The cake also comes with a dollop of azuki bean paste: a reminder that red beans and green tea make up one of Japan’s most successful long-term relationships.
If you’re lucky, you’ll be seated in the tatami tea room rather than at a café table. In the chashitsu, you can sip your tea while enjoying the flowers and the calligraphy, the shades of green in the garden and a thousand considered details. Lift your water glass, for instance, and you'll find a dimpled base catching the light like a tiny art installation.
You’ll leave planning a second visit because, at Motoan, no matcha confection must be left behind.
Zen Café (Zenkashoin)
On Muromachi Street, among kimono merchants and old townhouses, you’ll find Zenkashoin: a confectionery shop, café and art gallery tucked inside a 325-year-old machiya.
Unlike the more common narrow-and-deep townhouses, this one spreads out with unusual breadth, complete with a kura storehouse and a toriniwa earthen-floor passageway that pulls light and air through the building. It’s the kind of architecture that teaches you about Kyoto even before you sit down.
The courtyard garden balances gravel, water features and a weeping cherry descended from Maruyama Park’s famous tree. Visitors can stroll through the toriniwa to view the garden then enjoy it from a different angle in the café.
The dessert to order at Zen Café is Yuuzen, a deconstructed matcha parfait laid out on a tray. Instead of a glass tower, you get a set of ingredients: cubes of matcha castella in a bamboo platter, vanilla and green tea ice cream, butter shavings, red bean paste, a bowl of cream, mini monaka wafers and kuromitsu syrup.
Every bite is a new experiment. The character ‘yuu’ in the dessert's name (游膳) refers to wandering or playing and the parfait is exactly that: a game of wandering from ingredient to ingredient, putting them together in different ways to find the perfect combination.
The 'Zen' in Zenkashoin isn’t the 禅 of Buddhist meditation fame but 然 - a character that can be translated as 'naturally' or 'just like that'. It sums up the café’s philosophy: offering flowers and sweets in the form they ought to take, nothing more, nothing less.
Throughout the building, flowers are arranged without affectation. The same spirit can be seen in the desserts. However carefully the parfait components are chosen and plated, they appear unforced, as if a toriniwa passage has been built into the dish itself, letting air and light move freely through.
The result is sweets that feel alive in the same way the machiya does: graceful not because they’re contrived but because they breathe.
The Yuuzen parfait is available only from around mid-April to mid-September, a seasonal treat in keeping with Kyoto's natural rhythms. But even outside those months, the tea house offers other sweets that encourage you to wander, explore - and play with your food.
Salon de Muge (also known as Kikunoi Mugesambo)
Any café emerging from the culinary constellation of Kikunoi, the Michelin-starred kaiseki powerhouse, would have a hard act to follow.
Salon de Muge, opened in 2017 in the scenic Higashiyama area, is the group's lighter sibling - a place where the artistry of fine dining strolls in for a bento box lunch (reservations accepted) then lingers into afternoon tea.
Architecturally, it feels like a modern tea hut: earthen walls, wood, washi paper, bamboo and a low-key moss garden.
The matcha parfait is reason enough to hunt for the place. Where most cafés go tall, Salon de Muge goes low and wide - a short glass crowned with oval scoops of ice cream circled by sponge cake cubes, matcha jelly and springy shiratama.
The presentation is sculptural - the spoon appears, not on the side, but positioned in the glass as an elegant vertical line.
The flavor is balanced and the textures multi-dimensional: the matcha assertive but not overpowering, the jelly soft but with a bite and red beans appearing as buried gems rather than a monolithic lump. There are no wafers, though, to supply the crunch - if you miss it, bite the spoon.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is the staff. Professionalism is expected - this is, after all, a Michelin-starred group - but what catches you off guard is the warmth.
The service may be busy but the staff make time to connect with guests, chatting and smiling - even with a pair of cosplaying Chinese tourists who speak no Japanese and hardly any English.
The mood is mellow, punctuated with bursts of laughter as another mountain of shaved ice is served.
Perhaps that’s what sweets are about: a mini matsuri, a festival in the middle of everyday life, something that lifts your spirits so you return to the workaday world a little lighter - even if the bathroom scale says otherwise.
Seize The Parfait
Kyoto has plenty of temples but, for matcha pilgrims, its cafés are also holy ground.
Step out of Salon de Muge and, just two doors down, you’ll find a shop selling gravestones - a quiet reminder to seize the day. Life is short, so you might as well have dessert first.
Text and photos by Janice Tay