Blue Bottle Coffee has opened their first outlet in Kyushu to great fanfare. On a pre-open event, the beautiful "influencers" were brought in to do their magic. A following day, the cafe was packed and a long line of customers snaked out the front door like poop out of a guppy's ass.
So odd, I thought. The hype.
Yes, Blue Bottle has good coffee. Not great, but good enough. That's really all a legal narcotic needs to be. Good enough. But what it may lack in flavor, it more than makes up for in shop design and location. I've been to half a dozen BBs from San Francisco to Tokyo to Kyoto and all of them are gorgeous. The ones in Kyoto, in particular, are worth visiting.
The shop in an old house in the Higashiyama District is my favorite. The first time I went, I just gawked and gawked. How on earth did a little coffee chain from Oakland go from having about three outlets to so many in Japan, I wondered.
I gnawed on this mystery like a chunk of old beef jerky for a while. Was this just another start-up gone bonkers thanks to venture capitalists throwing money at it? I've seen that kind of thing a lot. Go to a supermarket and you'll find a new brand of, say, potato chips you've never heard of before and behind it is a get-rich-quick scheme of sorts. But Blue Bottle seemed different. Something or someone had to be behind it.
Well, I spat that hunk of beef jerky out and snooped around the Internet until I found the answer: Nestle. In 2015, Fidelity Investments poured $70 million clams into the company. That same year, they opened their first outlet in Japan. It was sold as a case of gyaku-yunyu (reverse importing) as Blue Bottle was bringing back the hand-poured and siphon coffee making techniques that were inspired by traditional coffee shops in Japan.
Then in 2017, Nestle bought a majority stake (about 70%) in the coffee chain and then started opening up outlets in other Asian countries. And now things don't seem so mysterious to me anymore. All those gorgeous influencers and sheeple were lining up for Nescafe.
At least the shop designs are cool.
At the Blue Bottle in San Francisco’s Embarcadero in 2001.