Comme Chinois

comme chinois does one thing consistently well: it takes coffee seriously without performing that seriousness at you. you won't find the usual theater here, no conspicuous ritual meant to signal effort. what you get instead is a shop that's built a quiet, genuine reputation on gokodori, a stretch of chuo ward that rewards the kind of attention most people save for somewhere more famous. kobe isn't short on good coffee, which makes it harder to stand out, and yet this place has managed it. the basement address, 7 chome on gokodori, means you're going slightly out of your way to get here. that's fine. go in the afternoon, when the day hasn't fully decided what it wants to be, and order something slow.