Bear Pond Espresso
Katsuyuki Tanaka is a trip. After living in the United States for more than 20 years, the former advertising executive and his wife returned to Tokyo and opened Bear Pond Espresso in 2009. Neither had any professional experience making coffee.
Tanaka discovered the coffee scene in New York when they lived there and decided to open a coffee bar that would push past the boundaries of American-style espresso. He and his wife took over a former candy shop in Setagaya, a newly fashionable district with narrow streets and good shopping.
The drink to order at Bear Pond Espresso is espresso. It isn’t anything like the espresso you know. It’s as viscous and syrupy as aged balsamic, and so naturally sweet it tastes strikingly like melted chocolate. By the numbers, it’s a .5-ounce shot pulled from 22 grams of coffee. (As a comparison, a standard 1.5-ounce double shot is pulled from about 20 grams of coffee.)
Tanaka first fell in love with espresso in Buenos Aires, where he was working on a commercial for canned coffee with Diego Maradona in 1987. One morning at his hotel, he watched a local stagger into the cafe next door. “The guy orders an espresso,” Tanaka said. “He’s drunk and smoking cigarettes, 4 a.m. Nobody there, still dark. How much sexy, right?”
The memory came flooding back in 2005, when he had a shot at Ninth Street Espresso, in Manhattan. Now Tanaka works with the coffee roaster Noriaki Yoshime (pictured) to finesse Bear Pond Espresso’s distinctly dense flavor profile. “We’re not going to copy anything,” Tanaka said. “Everything imagination.”
You can’t just show up at Bear Pond Espresso and order the espresso. There are rules: No espresso after 2 p.m. (according to Tanaka, a wonky power grid affects the machine), no photographs. Most important, no Tanaka, no espresso. Because only Tanaka is allowed to use the B.P.E. Original Technique, sketched out here in his book, “Life Is Espresso”
And only Tanaka makes the “Dirty,” pictured here — a shot of espresso floating in a Mason jar of cold milk topped by a second shot of espresso. It tastes like ice cream dusted with dark cocoa. “First aroma, then fresh mouth,” Tanaka said. “It’s espresso, normal whole milk. Nothing special. But the way it’s put is most important. It’s technique.”
Part of the adventure of Bear Pond Espresso is getting there. (A second location, No. 8 Bear Pond, has cappuccinos and lattes but no espressos or Dirties.) You navigate the multistory maze of Tokyo’s Shibuya Station, line up for a commuter train on the Keio Inokashira Line, and pour out a few minutes later at at Shimokitazawa Station. Trains slice through the neighborhood, civilized chaos.
Tanaka lets his freaky espresso flag fly because the move from New York to Tokyo was liberating. “I’m a hippie,” he said. “I was born here and traveled the world, several times to the United States and back to here, and no house anymore, so that’s why. Hippie. And freedom. And revolution. Right?”
Let’s check this place out sometime.
