TAOCA COFEE Kobe Motomachi — Restaurant in Kobe

If you love good coffee & freshly baked pastries to eat with with your cup of Joe, but your afternoon latte keeps you up, you are in the right place! They have fine & yummy Ethiopian decaf* espresso based drinks, but their drip coffee is also yummy.

Originally from Nishinomiya, but glad they opened in a nice side street of downtown Kobe. It’s a cute coffee shop with a unique atmosphere (due to the old building it’s in).

You can try all the high quality coffee (12 kinds!) freshly brewed by talented baristas, and get your fave to brew at home.

Secret tip: Moccamaster drip coffee machine, known to be the best & owned by many coffee snobs :) I had the cheapest price tag I aver saw in Japan, don’t miss it if you love drip coffee and are too lazy to brew it yourself - or if you...

As far as the quality and selection of coffee beans is concerned, Taoca is the no.1 coffee roastery in the area, at least in my opinion. I wondered though about the Motomachi Chinatown location. Why open another branch there in a little backstreet in China Town? It doesn’t really suit the atmosphere there. And China Town tourists probably don’t look for coffee. There are no tables to sit down, which is ok, because Taoca is predominantly a coffee bean roaster and not a cafe, but its still a pity. There is a cafe on the 2nd floor, but it is not Taoca, so if buy a Taoca take-away coffee you cannot drink it up there, but you would have to buy a coffee there instead. And that makes no sense, because people who go to Taoca want to drink Taoca...

What an absolute gem of a café! The coffee was incredible, with a great variety of beans to choose from. They even let us taste the beans they use, which was such a lovely touch. Upstairs, there’s a cosy little seating area where we enjoyed some of the best cheesecakes I’ve ever had. It might look unassuming, but the cheesecakes completely blew me away! I highly recommend both the basque cheesecake and the classic one, both were full of flavour but not overly sweet.

There was a short wait to be seated, but it’s easy to see why - the coffee and desserts were exceptional, and the staff were so friendly, accommodating, and genuinely apologetic for the wait (which honestly wasn’t a problem at all) 😊

I’ll definitely be coming back when I...