Coffee House Kahikan (こぉひぃはうす 可否館) is a delightful little Showa-era cafe in Shimoda, Izu. The shelves and walls of the cafe are covered in tea cups and saucers.
The one downside of this place is that it is still smoking-allowed - which I didn’t realise until we rocked up to its entrance and saw a sign on the door. We decided to give it a try anyway, and when we entered luckily we couldn’t really smell any odour of cigarettes at all and there was no one inside smoking at the time. Later on, one customer did get out their cigarette, but the smell of it wasn’t too strong so we still enjoyed ourselves.
When we entered, the owner (a local grandma) looked rather harried and a bit overwhelmed by the number of customers (there were probably only 5 or 6 of us in the store in total) and warned us that it would take quite a while to get our orders served.
Soon after that though, what seemed to be her two grandsons piled in with an energetic “tadaima”, along with their mum (I assume the daughter of the grandma). Once her daughter started helping out with the orders, she seemed to cheer up quite a bit. A couple of locals seated at the counter seemed to know each other and struck up conversations, so I got the sense this was a bit of a gathering place for people in Shimoda.
The food itself is fairly standard Showa-era cafe fare - we got the omurice and spaghetti. It was good food!
They serve the coffee after the food, so I got a Vietnamese coffee (not so traditional) and my husband got the Wiener (or Vienna) coffee. Which is coffee with whipped cream served on top, and quite popular in traditional Japanese coffee houses like this.
Apparently the first ever store to name and serve Vienna Coffee in Japan was a cafe in Jinbocho called Ladrio so I might have to check it out sometime.
The coffee is made with a vacuum coffee maker of sorts, which was rather fun to watch.
In Japanese, the word “coffee” is usually written as コーヒー or sometimes more traditionally, 珈琲. However the store name has gone with the alternative spellings of こぉひぃ and 可否. There was a print up on one wall with the history of the many variations on how coffee was spelled in Japanese.
The reason there are so many alternatives to begin with is that coffee was first introduced to Japan by the Dutch in the 1600s (via Nagasaki - the only trading port Japan had open to the rest of the world at the time). The Dutch word for coffee is “koffie”, and so the Japanese then had to choose their own way of writing it in their language. I suppose it took quite a while for everyone to standardise on the one spelling.
Note the store is also cash-only. I think I would probably give the place a miss if it was full of smokers (I quite hate the smell). If you were looking for another coffee place, The Black Ship Coffee seemed like it might be quite good, so I would recommend checking that out.
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