Zeroku Hommachi — Restaurant in Osaka

Mixed feelings. 👍🏻Super cute interior with history. Loved the atmosphere. 👎🏻 Rude to foreigners. Racist vibes.

I stumbled upon this 100+ year old cafe family business and was immediately very impressed by the decorations. I enjoyed the ice cream and coffee (it was nice, but not super special). The major attraction of this place would be the decorations and vintage furniture.

However only the youngest male staff there was polite. ALL the other people gave me super rude/and dare I say racist vibes.

They greeted me enthusiastically in Japanese (I am East Asian), and once I spoke in English, their attitude completely changed. (I did not move about or disrupt anything. I was completely still in my own seat, didn’t even stand up, was completely polite, please & thank you, bowing, smiling, but they weren’t.)

The cafe was completely empty, and I picked my phone to take one pic (the first attached pic) and a male waiter immediately marched over, and literally threw a card in front of me that says in multiple languages “please do not take photos of other customers”. There was no one there!!

Except for the youngest man, NOBODY smiled at me. They gave me dirty looks throughout. I tried to know more about the place, asked them how long this cafe had been here. The youngest man answered, while the other men swiftly left the room.

Honestly I was quite upset after being there. It ruined my mood a bit for the day. Been coming to Japan for more than two decades now, and this was one of the worst experiences with customer service I’ve ever encountered in this country. It completely went against what I know with Japanese people.

(As I read all these other reviews, I realized none of the reviews originally written in Japanese commented on rudeness. Only those with usernames that don’t sound like Japanese/typed in English that mentioned this “rudeness”, “annoyed”, not optimal...

We stopped there for iced coffee and, of course, ice cream. The coffee itself is nothing special, drip coffee served over ice. The ice cream on the other hand is good and soft, not quite a gelato, not regular ice cream, somewhere in the middle. They serve it in a thin but hard shell made of something sweet allowing you to eat it just like an sandwich.

The place is very small and the staff will make you feel like you’re bothering them if you do not speak Japanese and want to sit at a table. It’s not because they do not like tourists or you specifically but, because the takeout window is so busy, any additional time spent communicating with you is slowing down the line outside that’s never very long but always present.

The contrast of novelty (ice cream balls in a hard shell container) and the tradition (the place is more than 100 years old) coupled with the great taste makes this place well worth...

They were the kind of coffee shop that felt like stepping into another era. The coffee here was deep and straightforward, served in a beautiful classic cup that added to the experience. It had a clean bitterness that paired effortlessly with their signature ice cream monaka, a crisp wafer shell encasing creamy vanilla ice cream. The contrast between the hot, robust coffee and the cool, gentle sweetness of the monaka was simple yet deeply satisfying. It’s a pairing that perfectly captured the charm of old-school Japanese...