Matcha in Paris

The most serious piece of Japanese tea infrastructure in Paris, and it has been here since October 2008 — the first Jugetsudo tea house outside Japan, opened by Maruyama Nori, a Tokyo house trading since 1854. The shop was designed by Kengo Kuma and was his first completed work in Europe: a bamboo temple of thousands of suspended stalks over a single knot-free Japanese cypress counter, with a cast-iron kettle sitting on it. The house motto is cha zen ichimi, tea and Zen one taste, and the basement is a stone-paved cellar Kuma describes as an underground grotto, used for exhibitions and tea ceremonies. Their green teas come from Shizuoka, Kyoto and Kagoshima. What you get in the bowl is the opposite of a sweet café latte: fine even foam, a savoury marine-vegetal length, almost no astringency.

One Paris tea house. Directories often list 13 rue des Saints-Pères — that is the company's French trading address, not the tea house. Use rue de Seine.

Kiji is a Japanese company, registered in Nihonbashi Honcho in Tokyo, that opened its first physical shop anywhere in Paris — which makes it structurally different from a French café buying matcha wholesale. They carry eight distinct matcha references and sell B2B to other cafés, so the counter range spans everyday grades up to competition-grade single origins rather than one house blend; the named ones are Sukona, Jinmu and Kazan. The upstairs room is laid with handmade tatami from Kyoto around low tables, shoes off, and is the closest thing in Paris to sitting in an actual kissa, which is remarkable two minutes from the Opéra. Downstairs is a straight modern coffee shop with homemade mochi and specialty coffee, so it works for twenty minutes as well as an hour.

Single shop, open seven days 8.30am to 7pm, which makes it the most accessible high-end matcha in central Paris.

The oldest name on this list by centuries — a Kyoto wagashi house of imperial-purveyor standing that opened this Paris shop in 1980, decades before matcha was a trend, specifically to teach France what wagashi is. That gives it something no new opening has: an actual reason to exist. The matcha is organic and served in two grades, whisked in front of you, and it is built to be drunk with a wagashi, so the bitterness is designed against the bean sweetness rather than sanded off with milk. The room reopened after a renovation themed on artisanal know-how, in ivory plaster and pale wood, deliberately quiet. Standing outside you are between the Tuileries and the Place de la Concorde, which is part of the pleasure: you step off one of the loudest corners in Paris into a room where nobody is talking loudly.

Single Paris boutique and tea salon. Book ahead for the salon; the lunch menu is popular.

The only place in Paris where matcha arrives as part of a curated sequence poured by a tea specialist rather than as a drink you order. OGATA is the Paris project of Shinichiro Ogata of Simplicity in Tokyo, and the sabō is the quietest room in it: seventeenth-century Marais stone walls, a central table cut from jindaitamo, bog ash, the tree of God, and a tea selection rebuilt each season. Host and guest are treated as co-authors of the moment, which sounds like brochure language until you sit down and realise nobody is going to rush you. The matcha lands at the end, deliberately, as the most concentrated thing you have tasted in an hour of escalating intensity. There is no €6 latte here; this is a seated tea service from €35.

One 800m² building holding restaurant, bar, boutique, gallery and the sabō. Reservation required. Note the lift is out of service, stairs only, and under-12s are not admitted to the sabō.

The first café in France built entirely around matcha, and still the most educational place on this list. Their matcha is certified organic and grown at Uji in Kyoto, and they publish an unusually detailed explanation of why it matters: three weeks of shading before harvest keeps theanine from converting to catechin, which is the actual mechanism behind umami rather than bitterness. They use ceremony-grade powder for drinks, not culinary grade. Because they present matcha exactly as a specialty coffee bar presents espresso — shot, cortado, cappuccino, latte — this is the single best place in Paris to taste the raw material against milk in three formats in one sitting. The coffee is roasted by Coutume and pulled on a Synesso, which tells you how the room is run.

The rue Béranger café is the sit-down one. A takeaway-and-bento branch runs on rue Pierre Demours in the 17th. Both close for roughly three weeks each August and again over New Year, so check before travelling.

On sourcing authority alone, Tsujiri outranks almost everything else in Paris. The house was founded in 1860 in Uji by Riemon Tsuji, who is credited with reshaping the Kyoto tea trade, and has traded as Gion Tsujiri since 1948; the Uji main store is still a pilgrimage stop for matcha travellers. Opening on the rue des Petits-Champs in autumn 2025 put a 160-year-old Uji tea house inside the Sainte-Anne Japanese quarter, two minutes from Palais-Royal, and it is the closest a Parisian can get to drinking a Kyoto producer's own matcha in the city. Early French reviewers describe exactly what you want to hear: matcha that is neither over-sweetened nor bitter, which is the narrow band most Paris cafés miss in one direction or the other.

Tsujiri's first and only French address. Reported takeaway only with no seating, so buy and walk 200 metres into the Palais-Royal garden.

This is the barista's matcha bar rather than the tea house's, and it earns its place because the person running it knows how to make a drink. Emilie Zhou grew up in the neighbourhood and worked as a barista at Café Coutume before opening Moonlight in July 2024; she trains her own staff, and the matcha — organic, ceremonial, from Uji — is sifted and whisked with a proper chasen in front of you rather than pre-batched from a bottle. That single habit is what separates this from most of the €6.50 lattes in the 3rd. The room is small, bright and plant-filled with counter and window seats, laptop-friendly and genuinely quiet on a weekday afternoon. Taste-wise it leans creamy and rounded rather than austere, and the fruit versions use real purée.

Single site with no website. Widely reported to close on Wednesdays, but hours are unconfirmed — check Instagram first.

Founded in Paris in 2022 and now the city's most visible matcha-only brand, Matcha Social Club imports its powder directly from Uji in Kyoto prefecture rather than through a European wholesaler — the same origin as the serious tea houses here, applied to a fast modern made-to-order counter. The interior is deliberately brutalist: grey concrete, one wall climbing with graphic tins, jade bowls as the only colour. What they are genuinely good at is texture, and the reason their iced matcha gets named the best in Paris is that the tea stays legible under the milk and the sweetness stays low enough that you still taste the vegetal top note. They also run tastings and workshops and sell their own selection for home, which is more commitment to the ingredient than most trend cafés make.

One café, with their retail matcha also stocked at Le Bon Marché. Published hours conflict across sources, so verify.

Be clear with readers what this is: a Japanese-owned matcha dessert parlour and tea salon, not a purist tea house. The tea is Uji-sourced and they do serve a straight ceremonial matcha, but the centre of gravity is soft serve, bingsu, kakigori, parfaits, boba and layered cakes, and their own site states everything is made in-house by professional cooks from ingredients brought in from Japan. Taken on those terms it is very good, and it is the most reliable matcha in Paris — five branches open late, which covers the after-dinner and late-afternoon slots when every tea house in the city is shut. The rue Volta room is the one to visit: dark blue shopfront, minimalist interior, sculptural lighting, quiet corners.

Five Paris branches — rue Volta, Bastille, Saint-Augustin, Bercy and Lafayette — open daily until roughly 10.30pm. Rue Volta is the original.

This is a fashion-house café chain, not a tea specialist — worth saying plainly. It earns the tenth slot because the sourcing is real and unusually transparent for a chain: Café Kitsuné sells ceremonial-grade matcha from Kagoshima, hand-picked in early May to tea-ceremony standard and described by the house as creamy with rich umami and only delicate bitterness, and they also retail a 30g Uji tin. In the cup that translates into something notably mild and non-bitter, which is exactly right for a first matcha and exactly why people who dislike matcha often like this one. Beyond the tea, the setting does a lot of work: you drink it under eighteenth-century arcades looking at the Palais-Royal fountain, which is arguably the best seat attached to any matcha in Paris.

Palais Royal and Vertbois in Paris, plus cafés worldwide. Order at the counter at Palais Royal, then sit by the fountain among the Buren columns.