murmur coffee kyoto — Restaurant in Kyoto

TLDR: Avoid if crowded or coming right at opening time. You will be made to wait abhorrently long time for the food.

We visited the cafe right at opening time. There was already a short queue of people, but nothing dramatic and definitely nothing unusual on a holiday at a cafe which does have a great location right by a canal. I think that we were the 4 couple of people who sat down, maybe 5th or 6th to order. We ordered raclette and pizza toasts with soup which was pumpkin, hot coffee and nuts cake. Oh boy. We waited literally an hour for two pieces of toast and the toast was only ALRIGHT, nothing extra special. My biggest complaint would be the absolute lack of any sort of communication from the wait staff. After waiting for about 30 minutes, I asked her what is the holdup and if she could bring at least the coffee and the soup and maybe the cake? To which she replied that orders are made in a sequence in which they took them followed by the typical self-flogging style of apology. I refused to be satisfied with this explanation so started doing some back of the envelope calculations. There were a total of 4 staff - 3 loitering in the kitchen area "making" the food and the poor soul serving the front of the house having to be apologizing to everybody for the wait.

Now to a analysis of their operation: The cafe has approximately 20 seats. In my second round of interrogation "where the hell is my food" of the waitress, she slipped and actually told me that they can make only 4 toasts at once. My very cheap oven toaster with IR lamp can toast an average piece of Japanese "shokupan" in about 2,5-3,5 minutes depending on the type of bread (moisture of the bread/thickness). For their benefit, let's say they use some special bread/toaster and it takes 5 minutes for them to toast a slice of bread. By quick arithmetic, we can get to a hypothesis that they should be able to toast 20 slices of bread for the whole cafe in about 25 minutes + 2 minutes for taking the bread out. Since the toast in this particular cafe has a topping which needs to be melted, we need to account for that time as well. Let's say 3-4 minutes extra melting cheese etc. per batch. That puts us at about 8-9 minutes per batch of 4 toasts. Plus 1-2 minutes per batch for putting on the toppings. Which gives us about 10-11 minutes per batch of 4 toast. In conclusion they should be able to serve the whole cafe in 50-55 minutes, which definitely wasn't the case, since we did not order last from the group of people who were waiting for the place to open and filled all the seats. Not to mention there were some people who ordered just a coffee to go. It is obvious that the operation has some bottleneck and it needs to be resolved ASAP. It is insulting to keep someone waiting an hour for a piece of...

A hidden gem!

Hence a perfect score for this quaint little cafe situated next to the crystal clear water canal in the less crowded part of Kyoto. You can literally hear the water flowing and birds chirping if the cafe is not filled with patrons.

We were there 2 days in a row and on the second day, it was rainy but the atmosphere made it better ❤️

So grateful and pleased to have booked a hotel just 100m away and this was the first cafe that popped up when i was looking for a spot on google map.

Coffee is alright. I’ve had better elsewhere, but the shoutout goes to the toasts!

Day 1 - ordered honey and butter! It was crispy on the outside yet soft to bite on the inside.

Day 2 - we had the cheese toast and marshmallow chocolate toast. Still prefers the classic from day 1! Wanted soup on a rainy day but alas it was not available.

Service is excellent. Straight to the point, speaks good english and very friendly even if the place is buzzing!

I highly recommend if you are in Kyoto. Lovely spot for people watching, to zone out or to...

I’m giving two stars for the location and okay food. However, the food is still just a toast for which you have to wait a whole hour! We came to the place for a quick breakfast, wanting to be as early as possible in one shrine, but ended up spending 90 minutes there, out of which 60 minutes we were just waiting for two pieces of toast. I’m sorry, but if you go out for a regular lunch or dinner, you definitely don’t have to wait that long. We asked them to bring us coffee while we were waiting, but we were told they only serve it with the toast.. if there was a decent communication since the beginning (like if we were informed we would have to wait for an hour to receive what we ordered), we would have gone somewhere else. But nothing like that happened (even though we speak Japanese, so no language barrier). Anyway, if you have time, might be nice. But don’t go there too eager to get your meal as soon...