The 5 Best Matcha Cafés in Uji (2026)

Founded in 1854 and now in the hands of the seventh generation, Nakamura Tokichi is the tea house most people mean when they talk about drinking matcha in Uji. The main store occupies a beautifully preserved and renovated old tea factory around twenty minutes from Kyoto Station, with a traditional Japanese garden visible from the café seating — the setting alone justifies the trip. Matcha is served usucha style, whisked thin and properly, and the food menu built around it is the most complete in town: the signature Matcha Maruto Parfait is the item everyone photographs, but the matcha soba is the more interesting order and the range of tea-based desserts runs deep. The queue is a genuine feature of the experience rather than an occasional inconvenience — you can add yourself to a virtual queue rather than standing in line, which is worth doing the moment you arrive in Uji and then exploring while you wait.

The oldest tea shop in Japan, and one of the oldest continuously operating businesses in the world. Tsuen was founded in 1160 at the eastern end of Uji Bridge by Furukawa Unai, a samurai retainer of Minamoto no Yorimasa who, on retiring, took the name Tsuen Masahisa and began serving tea to travellers crossing the river. Successive generations served as bridge guardians, and the shop is now run by the 24th generation of the same family. The current building went up in 1672 in Edo-period machiya style, and sitting in it with a bowl of matcha is as close as you will get to drinking tea the way it was drunk here eight centuries ago. It faces Keihan Uji Station, so it is the first thing you reach coming in on that line. Order matcha straight and take the historical context seriously — this is the single most storied room on this site.

The most dessert-forward of Uji's major tea houses, and the one to prioritise if you are here for matcha sweets rather than a formal bowl of tea. Itohkyuemon's main branch is large, combining a substantial retail shop with a café, and it is where the town's most photographed matcha items live: the matcha soft-serve cones, the layered matcha parfaits built in tall glasses, and matcha roll cakes with a texture that genuinely earns the melt-in-your-mouth description. The retail side is the best place in Uji to buy matcha to take home, with grades spanning everyday culinary powder to ceremonial tins, and staff who will explain the difference. Open 10:00 to 18:00, though hours shift seasonally. Busy throughout the day; the soft-serve queue moves faster than the café one if you are short on time.

The Byodo-in branch of Nakamura Tokichi, positioned on the approach to the temple that appears on the ten-yen coin — and the practical answer when the queue at the main store has become unreasonable. It is a smaller and more compact operation than the Uji Ichiban honten, without the old tea factory and garden, but the tea comes from the same house and is prepared to the same standard, which is the part that matters. The location is the argument for it: Byodo-in is the reason most visitors come to Uji in the first place, and having a serious bowl of matcha available immediately before or after the temple saves backtracking across town. Treat it as the efficient version rather than a lesser one — same tea, less waiting, better placed for the sightseeing.

The one on this list that locals rate as highly as visitors, and the corrective to a day spent entirely on parfaits. Uji Chaganju's reputation rests on matcha soba — buckwheat noodles made with Uji matcha worked into the dough, served cold with dipping sauce, and genuinely tasting of the tea rather than merely being tinted green. It is a proper lunch rather than a dessert stop, which makes it the sensible middle of an Uji itinerary: tea house in the morning, soba here, sweets in the afternoon. Prices sit below the big-name tea houses and the room is unpretentious. The matcha drinks are well made too, but the noodles are the reason to walk in. A useful reminder that in Uji matcha is a food ingredient with centuries of local cooking behind it, not only a drink.