Starbucks slayed the kissa

All with a proper roast

In 1996 Starbucks saved my life in Japan.

You heard me. Saved. And before you get all Coffee Snooty, teeth-clenched, and hissy about what a retail tool I am—how I would love to destroy the world we know, and how everyone knows [fill in the blank coffee] is so much better…

Let me halt your pampered ass right there. You have no idea what Japan was dealing with until they came. You just don’t.

I will state it for the record. In the year One Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety-Six of Our Lord, a single Starbucks opened on a quiet corner just behind Ginza’s glitzy 4-chome intersection, and mornings in this country were never the same. The unmistakably savory and just damn delicious aroma of real beans slow roasted and ground to perfection wafted for blocks.

I came to call that pioneer branch My Own Private Mecca. I felt it came here to save me alone, yet like Mecca, it was swamped with thousands of other pilgrims.

Why the excitement? The frank answer is that, although Japan was already a coffee crazy country with consumption going up not down, no one here had tasted the true flavor of coffee until then.

You may snicker. But this spot in Ginza is holy, so wide was the desert we crossed.

Prior to 1996 all coffee came from a company called U.C.C. Come to think of it, I’m actually not sure if it was actually a company. No one you knew worked for a place called U.C.C. No one had been there. Were there even any offices? Well, U.C.C. was at least a brand name, and it was stamped literally on everything coffee here.

I was never told what the initials stand for but soon after my first few sips I decided it had to be Unbelievably Crap Coffee.

The first thing you noticed with Unbelievably was the pale, almost blonde color of the beans. I suppose they were roasted in some fashion, but as if the roasters all had better things to do than to finish their jobs. The beans were yellowed and the coffee they produced tasted stale and oddly sour.

No matter where you turned for a cup of coffee, there was that retched U.C.C. logo staring back at you. In the supermarket aisles. In the coffee shops on the cups and plates. On vending machines, bottles, packages, and incessant TV commercials hawking cloyingly sweet hot and cold “coffee drinks” in metal cans.

Imagine you are a condemned soul. You have been sentenced to an eternity of eating nothing but Swanson’s Hungry Man Salisbury Steak TV dinners. There is nothing else. Those green peas. The defrosted mashed potatoes. The sad little apple pie square. And of course the Alpo-like steak mush in a tin tray. Then one day you are magically transported to a table at Morton’s for an expertly grilled and drizzling porterhouse, washed down with a flawless Montepulciano.

That was what Starbucks brought to Japan one fateful day in 1996.

Now you must understand that I am only kvetching about the beans Japan was using back then. The coffee experience here was however quite something before Starbucks ever placed a pin in our map.

You’ve all heard the stories about western business people coming to Japan several decades ago and finding that a single, non-refilled cup of coffee cost $10 or even $15 here.

Those tales are true. I’ve been to those places, and there was a clear reason for the costs. Yes, the coffee was undrinkable, but the effort put into presentation and an almost unforgettable shop atmosphere was world class.

First, the shops, or kissa, themselves were often exquisite. You found yourself gliding to your table along thick, beautiful carpets to relax on hand-crafted and -upholstered furniture sourced from around the world. Napkins were woven, silverware was curated, and cream and sugar were served in impeccable ceramic or pewter pots. The oshibori hot and ice-cold towels were actually cotton, not packaged plastic. Real art hung on the walls of the kissa. Jazz or often classical music hand-selected by the owner played from audiophile-perfect turntables powered by vintage tube amplifiers and speaker systems. The staff wore stiffly ironed and pressed white shirts with bow ties, spotless aprons, and sometimes bleach white gloves.

The clean-shaven boys and men who worked the kissa wore their hair high and back, slicked with pomade. The ladies too were not to be outdone. (One day I went to a kissa in shorts and I believe I heard a quiet gasp when I stepped into the shop.)

For your $10-15, a skilled professional dedicatedly ground the beans in a hand-turned grinder. Electric would be noisy and gauche. He then precisely measured out by weight an amount of grinds that—with a predetermined exact pour of water—would deliver a perfect final volume, down to the cc, into the cup. Often stepping on a small foot ladder to gain needed height, your crafter would deposit the grinds into a filter above a tall drip contraption made of hand-polished brass and a maze of spotless glass tubes. He (slowly!) boiled purified water to an exact Celsius temperature and hand drizzled the liquid from a kettle patiently, over and over, layer by layer, into the filter which then gravity-dripped your coffee through the glass tubes to a heated cup below. One person’s single serving could take as much as 15 minutes to prep and serve.

Starbucks blew all that apart. Suddenly we had a team of kids in chinos and jeans trained in quality plus speed. They turned out an amazing collection of concoctions in an assembly line approach.

And it was delicious. The sneaker and polo shirt kids did it with quality beans finally roasted, even toasted dare I say. The taste difference was night and day...or you could say dry yellow and oily chocolate brown.

What arrived at our lips from 1996 onward was the fully rounded, sock in the jaw flavor of kick ass coffee, unmasking once and for all the phony pretender bean of U.C.C.

Starbucks quickly proliferated and I was all for it. Hey, they saved my life! While I do not today cheer the Starbucks I sometimes find at highway rest stops or across the street from landmark temples, Seattle’s success did bring us a line of global competitors and a fundamental change in flavor demand from the streets.

Now I think nothing of picking up giant bags of properly roasted beans from retailers as well as specialty houses. We have Howard Schultz to thank. Blessed Be His Name.

I still miss the old kissa coffee shops and do stop into a struggling survivor every once in a while just to travel back. A real oshibori, fine China, and music that is not Foo Fighters or “Summer Girl’s Garden Party Collection” is a fading treat I only recognized after Seattle arrived.

Take that, Starbucks. Shit coffee still exists and is celebrating its 50th anniversary.