Cafe Design Language & Pattern Matching

 

 

Participant (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan, this is my co -host Zongjun and we're the co -founders behind Sanko Matcha products.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (00:04)
Hello, hello.

Yeah,

so we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in matcha and share our startup stories and interview experts. So today we're going to talk about design language and pattern matching in cafes.

Participant (00:22)
And that concludes the scripted portion of this podcast.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (00:26)
Spoiler alert. So Ryan, can you give us a short summary

Participant (00:32)
Yeah. So what we wanted to talk about on this podcast today is about design language and pattern matching in cafes. And the reason we want to give this so much airspace early in the podcast are, because cafes are on the front lines of educating consumers about matcha. You have a lot of matcha education and exposure and influencers on the internet and a lot of people making it at home, but all of the IRL in real life.

Matcha drinking and ordering and education is usually done at your local cafe. So they're really important places that are growing in prominence in matcha. You know, it used to be five, 10 years ago, you know, maybe if you were lucky or in a very large city, you could easily order a matcha latte. But nowadays, every respectable specialty cafe that serves specialty coffee is also going to have matcha on their menu. And if you look around their cafe,

I was recently in Toronto. I don't know, a good 30, 40 % of the people in there were drinking matcha. And I've had similar experiences in New York and Paris and other major cities as well. So the article was about how do you identify a good cafe and what do you look for and what's the design language, conscious or unconscious, that allow us to pattern match against our experiences?

to say, OK, I feel like if I enter this establishment, my $8 matcha latte will be worth it, or, oh, I don't know about this cafe. It's probably not going to be any good. So how do we come to those judgments? By just looking at pictures in Google Maps or looking as we walk.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (02:01)
Yeah,

so, you know, in the past few years, we have been traveling around the world to a lot of places. For many places, it was our first time being there. And, you know, it...

it would largely be shooting the blind into the darkness if we weren't having such a pattern matching ability at the time. Because for all these cafes, for drinking coffee was almost a necessity for us to sustain ourselves in those places and work. So along the way, Ryan, can you share with us a little bit about how do you identify the good cafe?

Participant (02:55)
Yeah, so you can get a lot from just the design aesthetic and you can tell a lot about intentionality of the space itself. And Blue Bottle in particular is like very famous for being an early pioneer in a very minimalist design aesthetic. It was more about what you didn't see as much as it was about what you did see. And they did this stripping back. It's kind of turned around a little bit after it was acquired by Nestle a few years ago.

that retail shelf is getting pretty busy. I'm not sure what James Freeman, founder of Blue Bottle, thinks about that. But that type of aesthetic started to become more and more common. And it's a pretty good, reliable indicator, just at a glance, in the first second. And then if you go a little bit past the first second, you can start looking at some of their equipment. The espresso machine they're using, their coffee grinders, their kettles.

the way that they're brewing tea, what their matcha setup looks like, all are very good indicators. And within specialty coffee, quality and brew extraction, brew theory became very important with the third wave coffee movement. And there were all these problems to solve around doing a pour over or making really great espresso. And these new coffee,

equipment companies used functional design or sometimes new technology to help cafes make higher quality coffee. And you start seeing brands like Fellow, really famous for their stag kettle, come out, which really allows you to do a poor precision, like really slow, precise pour overs. As well as other companies, like it was discovered that EK43, very famous coffee grinder, it turns out it just makes fantastic espresso.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (04:41)
Yeah,

Participant (04:48)
when Matt Perger won the World Barista Championship using that grinder, it really became very popular. So that's a $5 ,000 piece of equipment. Sometimes you can find it a little bit less, but if a cafe has that, they're seriously committed to quality.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (05:04)
it's almost a label or a statement.

that a cafe is making right there by using all these equipment and using all of these design language to kind of talk to the consumers, the audience, like we care about cafe, care about the quality, and we care about how you feel in the cafe. So I think in that sense, you know, like the value of all these equipment and all the design,

in a cafe shop really transcend their utility value. It has a higher value proposition on another level, which means it's trying to convey a sense of quality, but not directly through a sensory experience.

Participant (06:00)
So, Zongjun, in your experience, what is the status quo of matcha in a cafe? If you were to walk into any random specialty coffee shop that has a lot of these vibes, where it looks like they really care about their coffee program, what is it that you're getting if you order a matcha latte or if they do serve pure matcha or something close to a matcha americano?

Zongjun (Sam) Li (06:23)
Yeah,

so my experience so far has been very off -putting. Like even if some cafe shops has all these wonderful setup for their coffee program, for matcha, it's usually very similar to each other. It's usually these very, you know, abused, sad looking chasen sitting in a bowl that got all matcha stains all around it.

and the barista doesn't necessarily know how to whisk the matcha properly in order for the matcha to foam up or have a less clumpy texture and matcha is usually a little bit stale so a little bit yellowish in color because

It's not like a coffee powder that you know from matcha powder you need to be they need to be carefully refrigerated and sealed so it's less taken care of so all of these is very like sometimes they almost look like a separate corner in the room like it's the matcha corner which is very sad looking and you have all these fancy

looking equipment for coffee.

Participant (07:46)
Yeah, usually it's covered in some sort of green powder.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (07:49)
Yeah,

but sometimes, you know, like I don't blame them because like there aren't a lot of professional matcha tools available for them to convey such message to the consumers.

Participant (08:00)
Very true. Very true. They're mostly just using ceremonial equipment, a lot of which has been slowly commodified. The cost has been reduced, being produced. A lot of it's being produced in mainland China, outside of Japan with sort of the lack of original care that like a Takayama Chasen or a tea whisk made in Takayama would have.

So like this very prized instrument is kind of turned into something that is a variable quality.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (08:33)
Yeah,

but even if they are using proper chasen made in Japan, the chasen are not getting cleaned or treated properly. They are very very abused used and covered with all tea stains all around it. And probably the times are slowly falling apart but they are still getting used because they are like...

Participant (08:44)
Yeah, very true.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (09:00)
20 -30 bucks per chasen. It's a pretty pricey investment for such equipment. But the chasen that people are using right now or all the other equipment, they're not meant for modern consumption scenario. They're not meant for being used 50 or 100 times a day. You perform Japanese tea ceremony,

Participant (09:10)
Yeah, it is.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (09:30)
maybe like once or twice a day and you know throughout the procedure you have a lot of the cleaning and caring process baked in into the ceremony so you know the the wares are made to meant to be you know taken care of properly but it's not necessarily the case in modern cafe you know you don't have an hour

Participant (09:44)
Yeah.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (09:59)
to wash your char -sen properly and have it dried on a char -sen stand.

Participant (10:04)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, if you go to a Japanese tea ceremony, there's like a specific step that you learn where you inspect the whisk to make sure no tines are about to fall off. So a guest doesn't consume a tiny shroud of bamboo.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (10:20)
Yeah, but you know in modern cafes, you can't do that. There waiting outside for their matcha latte and you better...

Participant (10:28)
Yeah. I

mean, the unfortunate part is the lack of an alternative. I mean, there are there's like one plastic chasen that's commonly available. And, you know, neither of us have direct barista experience. I was talking with a barista who was working at a matcha cafe in Chiang Mai in Thailand. And he said he was making 20 to 30 matcha lattes a day with one of the plastic whisks. And he said by the end of the day, his arm would hurt.

and it feels like he was about to get carpal tunnel. And he showed me why. I was sitting down at this tea counter chatting with him. And he said, here, try a Takeyama chasen and try one of these plastic chasens in a bowl of water. And I did it and it was shocking. The difference was huge. There's so much drag. Those plastic ones are like trying to move, sort of like trying to swim with all your clothes on. There's so much drag.

and it's doing more like turbulence creating than it is like whisking. Whereas like Takeyama Chasen's, each time, you know, when you cut those pieces of bamboo that way and you split them, they're usually rectangular. But in Takeyama, they cut the right edges off of them to make them more aerodynamic, almost like an airplane wing. And when you have a hundred of those going back and forth, it's like, not only is it like cutting through butter,

but it's mixing and creating all these like mini vortexes which can separate all of those matcha clumps and overcome, have those mechanical forces overcome the electrostatic forces keeping those little matcha particles together.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (12:10)
That's very interesting. So Ryan, I guess you have been to a lot of these higher -end coffee shops that are specialized to serve matcha. Do you find any difference in those places compared to other specialty coffee shops that are at the same time having a matcha program? Like, are they doing something different? Are they still trying to use ceremonial equipment?

or do they use them differently?

Participant (12:42)
Yeah, there's not that many of them, which is a little bit sad. And it really depends on the establishment. Inside the US, they feel a little bit more like traditional Japanese tea house experience. So in New York, for example, there's a great place in the East Village. They have tatami mats. It takes a very long time to get you a drink. And the person making it is doing everything in a deliberate order.

It actually is like almost a stripped down version of tea ceremony that's been kind of, they speed it up a little bit, but they're still placing everything in its exact spot, very deliberate movements. They've maintained all of that. It's actually a beautiful experience. So you have a lot of things that are like really fast versions of a ceremony, but still highly intentional. And then you have cafes that just flat out feel like a specialty coffee shop.

And a great example of that is in Bangkok. There's a place called MTCH. Marc from Ooika did a really great YouTube video about it that I recommend watching. That place, when I walked in, I thought, wow, this feels like the future of matcha. I imagine it was a similar feeling to walking into a blue bottle in the early 2000s, where everything about it just felt so different, yet made so much sense.

They had fellow kettles. Everything was just optimized for matcha. They had a bunch of chawan a bunch of chasens They had really smart clean -ups, setups, and ways to keep the whisks hydrated. They had a matcha gelato program where they weren't different flavors. They were just different intensities of the matcha. And it was a real breath of fresh air. They were developing a matcha flavor wheel.

that looks very similar to the SCAA coffee flavor wheel. And it really felt like, wow, this is like if a specialty matcha shop decided to not serve coffee, but just focus on matcha, taking those same principles.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (14:33)
Interesting.

So they're borrowing a lot of these elements and design language from specialty coffee.

but it's trying to relocate that into the world of matcha.

Participant (15:01)
Yeah, and it was a great celebration of what matcha can and should be. It was actually the first time there that I really, it really cemented the fact for me that matcha had different cultivars. Like even the way their menu was set up, you could get Okumidori cultivar, Samidori cultivar, Asahi. And like these were the first times that I was able in a cafe to have different cultivar choices and just work through the menu and like taste the differences and they're huge.

That was a really cool experience to be able to have.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (15:35)
Very interesting. I wonder why we don't see that more often in other places. Also in China, I've been to some of the matcha cafes in Shanghai and Guangzhou. And they look very similar to the ones in New York, which they are mostly just a watered -down kind of Japanese tea house. They serve tea drinks, they serve desserts.

wakashi or cakes with matcha flavors and matcha are being prepared in a very traditional way. It's a tea ceremony without the ceremony element basically.

Participant (16:19)
No. It's like a tea ceremony express. No sitting in Seiza. No tatami. And there's nothing wrong with that. Actually, I find it's a very approachable, very interesting way for people to get exposed to it.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (16:31)
Yeah, but you know, it's not necessarily something that people would want in the rush hour trying to get caffeinated. They probably preferred a matcha espresso or matcha latte to have good taste but also have the functional benefit.

Participant (16:50)
So, Zongjun more and more, we've been realizing that this visual language, these visual indicators of aesthetic and equipment are becoming less and less reliable, where some cafes will have all the right equipment and kind of have the right vibe. And we walk in and we're like, whoa, I can't believe we just spent $6 for this drink.

So it feels like there's almost, you can almost pay to be cool now.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (17:17)
Yeah, it's almost a sham. People start to learn all the patterns that a good coffee shop can be or should be and lift up all the elements and trying to create all these wannabe specialty cafes. But with the lack of the true intentionality and true caring of the products that they produce.

So like, you know, I feel like similar things can happen to matcha one day. It's this like, what we call it, specialty washing. Like you're trying to flood or intercept consumers, you know, expectation by using all of these visual language, visual components. But by the end of the day, you know, it's really the drink that people consume.

matters because you know you are going there pay for the drink unless you don't care about the drink right like other than that you know like this kind of specialty washing can really be you know a very like unfortunate surprise sometimes for us.

Participant (18:31)
You don't want to be specialty cafe catfished.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (18:34)
Yeah, yeah, that will be very unfortunate. Sometimes you have to pay the price. You don't know the neighborhood. It's the first time you're in the city. You got to maybe sacrifice a little bit to pay the tuition

that you have to pay in a new place. You don't know the neighborhood, you don't know the city. And all you can have a guesstimate to reference is the photos on the Google map. People upload the photos, people upload their drinks, and that's usually really your only benchmark.

Participant (19:13)
Yeah, there was a very interesting article written in The Verge, which we have linked in the post. It was an observation from someone that used to travel a lot and was also in design. And they realized that there was this, I think the term they used was Airbnbification, where they noticed that all Airbnb interior design started to look the same, very airy, spacious, modern, kind of minimalist. And they realized the same thing in cafe design.

that a really nice specialty cafe in New York looked very similar to the ones in Copenhagen, looked similar to the ones in Tokyo and in Paris. And he was saying that a large thing that influence our tastes are the way that people take inspiration from each other. And it might have been 30 years ago that you'd get inspiration from a magazine or from a book or at least visual inspiration, but now we're getting it from Instagram and TikTok.

and how these algorithms that surface or promote different aesthetics from different creators are homogenizing the look and feel and design language across these specialty cafes.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (20:18)
Yeah, it's

really the epitome of what kitsch or, you know, cliche is, right? Like they are all ones like cool things that people like. And it's just that, you know, over the time they're getting abused to use.

Participant (20:31)
Yeah.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (20:42)
that it developed into a cliche.

Participant (20:45)
or just straight off copy. I remember we were walking around Guangzhou and I said, look, Zongjun, this coffee grinder is not an EK -43, looks just like it. And we walked over and really got like, looked at the detail. It was a complete ripoff. It looks exactly like it. But they're clearly playing off of this pattern matching that we all naturally do to identify if a place really cares about their quality.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (21:13)
Yeah,

like sometimes even, you know, subconsciously they end up doing that because, you know, like I doubt for the quality of the coffee that they serve there, they really know what a EK grinder would look like. You know, it's probably just some cool grinders they find off from like Taobao and then it's in the lower price that they end up buying.

It's really a systematic cliche that you are fighting over there.

Participant (21:41)
So what will be the next wave of visual indicators that make Cafe stand out? Clearly, it's getting more and more subtle. It used to be very stark. You kind of had that bookstore aesthetic with these large batch coffee drippers and a very normal -looking espresso machine to now this beautiful, sleek, minimalist design. But now that it's more subtle, where are the frontiers of

Standing out. What do we look for now? How is our mental model of finding a good cafe? How has that changed?

Zongjun (Sam) Li (22:16)
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, like for matcha right now, as you mentioned before, they're borrowing a lot of these visual language, a lot of these equipments from specialty coffee. It probably serves a lot of the utility usage, but also at the same time,

it might not necessarily be a reliable indicator of quality. Just using a fettle kettle doesn't necessarily mean you whisk a good matcha. So I feel like there has to be something new, something developed or innovated, especially for matcha, that people can use as a benchmark in the future.

Participant (23:05)
Yeah, I totally agree. And I think some of the best cafes now have decided to have really good tea programs. Like they recognize that people want coffee alternatives and you know, we are by no means in that camp. Like we love both beverages. We think that the dialogue about coffee versus tea is just kind of a dumb conversation.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (23:24)
Yeah,

they are both gateway drugs to each other.

Participant (23:28)
Both great for clarity of mind and for knowledge work and just for enjoyment, pure hedonic pleasure. Both really great beverages and both healthy actually. James Hoffman, the famous coffee YouTuber, did a very long podcast interview with someone who was in nutrition and they have done studies about the gut microbiome in coffee.

and polyphenol content in coffee and fiber in coffee. Really fascinating conversation. It was way more healthy than I realized. And Michael Pollan, the famous food writer, also has done some reporting that coffee and tea are the primary ways that Americans consume polyphenols or antioxidants. Usually the primary source is from coffee or tea. So it's a...

great beverage all around. So this dichotomy of one versus the other is just a little silly.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (24:27)
Yeah, but back to matcha aesthetic and the future of I feel like that it's not something that, especially right now, it's not something that people need to develop a benchmark for quality that's the most urgent. I feel like it's something that you should avoid doing. So...

to kind of replicate this very unfortunate cliché into matcha again. Like a lot of these already abused elements or visual language, like for example in restaurants you see all these dim lights and old copper -plated wooden furniture and their burgers is like $20 with the outer side.

This kind of already abused cliche visual language, I feel like people should just avoid them at all costs.

Participant (25:30)
Yeah, I agree. I mean, people need to do things to stand out. And you're seeing it a little bit in like the really high end coffee shops. I was just at La Cabra, their new location in SoHo in New York. Beautiful space, beautiful setup. And their matcha setup's pretty nice. Other than the electric matcha whisker thing that kind of looks like a very large like hospital device. Other than that.

beautiful matcha setup. Clearly they're using handmade ceramics, they're using bowls with a spout, it's pretty clean. You see them constantly sifting their matcha and that it's in a very airtight can. So you're starting to see that, but really only at the highest end. But across cafes that serve things like that, they're usually some sort of handmade ceramic. It's a very custom looking setup.

But there's not a clear visual design language where someone could pattern match against and say, oh, they're doing things in a way that feels familiar, that feels like if I order a matcha, it's going to be good.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (26:40)
Yeah, but I feel like MTCH is a good start, you know, it's conveying all the right messages.

Participant (26:47)
Yes I agree. It's very much at the avant -garde of Specialty Matcha.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (26:56)
Yeah.

Participant (26:56)
Okay, well I think that's all we have time for today. Thank you for listening. You can find us wherever you find podcasts. Please recommend this to a friend or give us five stars. We'd really appreciate it. And we'll see you on the next one. Thanks.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (27:11)
And if you have your dream specialty matcha coffee shops in your mind, please let us know.