The Café that lives within Restaurants

How an empty dining room turned into a morning café.

Walk past a restaurant at nine in the morning and it is dark. The chairs are up, the kitchen is cold, the lease is being paid anyway. Most people see nothing. Kate saw a shop that already existed and simply wasn't open yet.

ASANO opens inside other people's dining rooms during the hours those rooms are not being used, and closes before the evening service arrives. There are two: one inside Sandro's on the Upper East Side, one inside The Noortwyck in the West Village.

She calls it flipping the usual coffee-shop model on its head — an idea she traces back to mottainai, the Japanese word for not letting something useful go to waste, one she grew up hearing.

And so a room that had only ever been lit in the evening began to be lit in the morning too. Coffee and whisked tea in the air, people at the tables, light in the windows on Bleecker Street — hours before the kitchen wakes up.

Kate is Japanese and American — she spent every summer in Japan as a kid, visited her parents who'd moved back to Tokyo throughout her twenties, and still speaks the language. Before ASANO, she worked in hospitality operations — Director of Strategy, Planning & Projects at Hawksmoor in New York, Deputy Chief of Staff to the CEO at Panera Bread, Chief of Staff at Mercato Metropolitano — after Princeton and Harvard Business School.

There is a moment each morning when the room changes hands.

I asked Kate whether such a moment exists — whether there is a point at which the space stops being the restaurant's and starts being hers. The answer was immediate.

“The noren going up is that moment. It's the visual signal the space has changed hands for the morning.”

Her team hangs it every morning before they open. At the end of service they take it down, clean, and put everything back. The room returns to the restaurant with no evidence that anyone else was there.

Nothing is built and nothing is fitted out. A morning at ASANO begins with one piece of cloth going up, and ends with it coming down.

She trusts the grower — but flavor made the final call.

ASANO's matcha comes from Osada, a tea house in Morimachi, Shizuoka, along the Ōta river. The company was founded in 1948 and is now in its third generation. It is a blend of two cultivars, Saeakari and Saemidori.

Saemidori is a name that turns up often on good Japanese tea — registered in 1990, bred for sweetness and almost no astringency. Saeakari is far less familiar, so I asked why it was there.

“Honestly — it tasted delicious.”

The blend is Osada's own recommendation, and she took it.

There is a reason those two names sit well together. Saeakari is Saemidori's own offspring — bred by Japan's national agricultural research organisation from a cross made in 1989 that used Saemidori as one parent, selected for yield and for resistance to two leaf diseases. Its official description notes that it carries a cultivar aroma and umami of the Saemidori type, and that it suits growing regions from Shizuoka southward.

The matcha served at ASANO is the matcha Kate's own palate accepted. She wants people to drink what she thinks tastes good.

Osada describes the tea as roasted almond, snap pea, umami. What Kate is firm about is the standard underneath the choice. Asked what tea she would refuse however good it tasted, the answer is one line: anything without a traceable, direct relationship to the farm.

She says the tea holds steady through the year — that what you drink in February is what you drink in June.

Here is what a bowl at ASANO actually involves.

Why it is not a matcha-only shop.

ASANO serves both, roughly half and half. Kate raised this herself before I could ask, and the way she framed it is worth quoting.

“It keeps the bar high rather than lower — matcha has to hold its own next to a well-made espresso, not just be the ‘alternative.’”

A single-origin from São Paulo sits on the same counter. Coffee is the standard she has chosen to set her matcha beside.

It's a useful way to place ASANO against the rest of the city. It isn't trying to be a ceremonial tea house, with all the ritual and stillness that implies, and it isn't a grab-it-and-go counter pour like a typical order at Blue Bottle. ASANO sits in between the two — ceremony-grade matcha, hand-whisked to order, moving at the pace of a normal New York morning.

People do arrive for one and leave with the other, in both directions. I asked what people expect from a café that ASANO deliberately does not do.

“A long, sprawling food menu — we stay laser-focused on coffee, matcha, and pastries rather than trying to be a full restaurant.”

The soul of this shop is the matcha and the coffee. That is how it sounded to me.

What to ask for, and who each one is for.

I asked her one plainer question, and the answer went to the centre of it.

Most of what I put to Kate was practical — temperatures, grams, who blends the tea, how the room works. Somewhere in the middle I asked something with no practical answer at all. What does tea mean to you?

“Tea is the thing that slows the morning down — a small, deliberate ritual in a day that otherwise can become quite chaotic.”

I did not expect that sentence.

And once you have that sentence, everything else she said lines up behind it.

— Yuki, MAISON YUKI Reading Kate's answers, I kept coming back to that one sentence about the morning — and to how much of her shop is built around it.

If you are going.

— Yuki says Order the hand-whisked matcha before anything with milk in it. Four grams to fifty is a dense measure, so expect something with real body to it rather than a long drink. And if you can, sit at the bar — it's the best seat for the vibe.