LIFE IN JAPAN
Ben Watson
 Occupation:
Owns Ben' Cafe in
Takadanobaba
"We've been open now for four
months. Before that I was doing all sorts of different things. I worked in a cafe in New
York for five years, and I always wanted to have my own place. It wasn't my original
motivation for coming here, but it was always at the back of my mind. My wife and I run
this place together, so it's a real mom and pop operation!
We open at 9.30 each morning, and stay open
till about ten thirtyish each night. Each day is different, but we usually get really busy
around lunchtime. It gets really packed. We get all kinds of customers - there's a great
spread of people living and working in this area. We get business people, students from
the university nearby, all sorts of people. Recently we were written up in Olive magazine,
a Japanese magazine for teenage girls, so lately we've been getting more high school girls
coming in. And of course we get a lot of gaijin as well. That's part of the attraction for
our Japanese customers - they like to be in a place where there are foreigners around.
It's interesting for them, a bit different.
It was really difficult to find retail
space on the ground floor in Tokyo. You hear about how the real estate bubble has burst
here and how there are so many empty buildings and all, but that's usually from the third
floor up. If you're looking for an office you can usually find a bargain nowadays. But
finding ground floor retail space is really quite hard to come by. We lucked out with this
place because we've got space for tables outside as well.
Takadanobaba is a great area. Western
people can actually afford to open up their own businesses here. Downtown, a lot of places
are owned by Japanese and managed by a 'token gaijin.' I actually own this place. And
there are a lot of places around here that are owned by foreigners, not just managed.
We don't use drip coffee (filter coffee),
we use espresso, so it's really, really fresh. The machine we use is an authentic Italian
Faema E91. It uses an electric pump to extract the coffee, which gives you much more
consistency. Getting the pressure consistent is the key to making really good espresso. It
should have a very thick 'crema', that's the natural coffee 'froth', about a quarter inch
thick.
The reason that Japanese cafe latte and
cappuccino aren't very good is that they tend to scald the milk. If milk is steamed beyond
160 degrees Farenheit, the lactose sugar breaks down and it tastes sour. We steam the milk
to just over 140 degrees so the milk doesn't scald. That's really the basic mistake that
Japanese cafes seem to make. They'll put the milk in a cup under the steam and walk away
and you can hear it boiling!
Another thing you have to be careful about
in Japan is 'blend' coffee. There's no standard. A Blue Mountain blend might just have a
very small percentage of Blue Mountain or Kilimanjaro or whatever and the rest of it is
the very lowest quality coffee.
Traditionally, the Japanese use the siphon
method, you know, those glass things, to make coffee. The problem with them is they
over-extract the coffee, it takes too long. I think that Japanese people, because of the
Japanese tea ceremony, they really get into the ritual of making coffee. And there's quite
a lot of ritual involved in making coffee via the siphon method.
People ask me what my target market is - I
tell them I don't want to limit our clientele. We're here for anyone who wants to come to
a cafe and drink coffee, that's the target market for us. The biggest pleasure is the
response I get from customers. For instance, when I serve a coffee with froth that has a
'flower' design on it, and they say 'Oh this is so beautiful!'"
Ben Watson talked to Rob Prince
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