Kissabō Tea Bar

Dining:

Kissabō Tea Bar

6 July 2026

Dining:

Kissabō Tea Bar

6 July 2026

Q: ⁠Kissabō means "tea room": you deliberately chose 房 over 店, room over shop. What does the bar represent to you, and where did the whole idea begin?

A: For us it represents something close to ikigai - the thing that makes our days feel worth it. That's why the room mattered more than the shop: 房 is a space you stay in, not a counter you pass through. Sixteen seats, walk-in first, a few seats can be held ahead for the tasting sets, but the room is for walking into.

It began in a conversation with a friend, a grand master of a tea school. He described it as a deep rest, like going to an onsen. That stayed with us: the wish to make a place where people could come, sit, and be looked after for an hour. The dream has grown since, and it's less about a room now and more about the community forming around it.

Q: ⁠You source tea directly from specific gardens in Kyoto, Shiga, Nara, and Shizuoka. Most people don't think about where their tea actually comes from. What should they know, and what happens during one of your seasonal tea ceremonies?

A: Most tea is sold without the one thing that matters most - the name of the person who grew it. We try to know the grower, the garden, the cultivar, the harvest. Our matcha, for instance, comes from Nakai, in Wazuka, Kyoto. We've also become part of something larger alongside the farmers - a quiet effort to make matcha's origins more transparent, so you can know whose hands made what you're drinking. More on that later this year.

As for the gatherings, they're small and built around the season.  This spring, for instance, guests were seated with a tray of koji drink, sencha paired with tomato, warabimochi with genmaicha, prepared in front of everyone, a matcha ceremony moving from thick koicha to lighter usucha and a hōjicha highball to close. It ended with a single ikebana leaf set down to mark the passing of time.

"Most tea is sold without the one thing that matters most - the name of the person who grew it. We try to know the grower, the garden, the cultivar, the harvest."

Q: ⁠What did Berlin lack that made you want to build Kissabō here, and what has running it taught you, personally and professionally?

A: Honestly, we never thought in terms of what Berlin was missing. The question for us was the other way round - what we could give the city. Berlin gave us room to try something uncommercial and take it seriously, and Kissabō is partly how we give that back: a careful place, a few gatherings a year, and the community growing around them.

What it's taught us, above all, is that none of it is done alone. Clemens Poloczek and the Ignant team photographed the room and told our story; Kreislauf Workshop helped shape what you walk into; Studio Cuze brought an exhibition into the space - to name only a few.

 A city, it turns out, answers care with care.

Q: ⁠Which places in Berlin do you keep returning to?

A: Reethaus, when we want something deeper: a room by the water built for stillness, where a concert or a ceremony is taken as seriously as we take a single cup; the kind of place we'd love to make something with one day.  Niko Izakaya, to sit on the other side of the counter for once.  Pastiche, for their listening evenings.  And AOIRO, whose spatial scents are how we actually come down after a long day.