flow by nozy coffee, a specialty coffee shop along Kyoto’s Kamo River

Fashion reporter and photographer Kazushi Takahashi turns his gaze beyond the runway, tracing the beauty that lives in the everyday. A graduate of Meiji University and Bunka Fashion College, he began his career as an editor at Bunka Publishing Bureau (MR High Fashion, Soen). Now freelance, he travels through Japan to write, photograph and style stories where fashion meets craft, design and culture, sharing what he discovers in each issue of Pen.

 ‘An address by the Kamo River, light roasts with distinctive flavours… this instantly earns a place on my Kyoto walking route.’
Coming from Tokyo, I stumbled upon a coffee shop that immediately delighted the tourist in me.
It was flow by nozy coffee, which had only just opened in January 2026.

Just beyond the café’s wide open windows flows the Kamo River, and somehow the mind—so easily inclined to fold inward—begins to drift gently outward instead.
All while surrounded by the aromas of single-origin coffees roasted separately according to each farm.

It is the kind of place that instantly makes you feel lighter.
The kind of café that makes you think:
‘Alright, I’ll cross the bridge over the Kamo, pass through Gion, and walk all the way up to Kiyomizu-dera.’
An address that gives you exactly that sort of positive momentum.

Of course, the quality of the coffee itself is excellent, but equally impressive is how accessible the location is.
Kyoto-Kawaramachi Station connects one of Kyoto’s liveliest shopping districts with Gion, the area famously associated with maiko.
For visitors, it functions almost like a central hub.
From there, the café is just a short walk toward Kiyomizu-Gojō Station along the Kamo River.

Despite the heavy tourist traffic in the area, the atmosphere remains surprisingly calm, perhaps thanks to the narrow side street it sits on.
Across the river, around Pontochō, the mood changes completely, with rows of bars and a much livelier nightlife atmosphere.
At flow by nozy coffee, by contrast, that pleasant feeling unique to wandering through Kyoto remains fully intact.

The café uses high-quality beans, while extraction is handled by the automated hand-drip machine POURSTEADY.
Speaking with one of the baristas, I was told:
 ‘We place great importance on spending time talking with customers to understand their preferences and choose the right beans. We leave the extraction to a high-performance machine so we can devote more time to conversation.’

The movements of the machine closely resemble those of a real hand drip.
Of course, there is probably a unique beauty to the craftsmanship and visual judgment involved in manual extraction, but the result here was already more than convincing.
In the world of audio equipment, for instance, it is often easier to get closer to your preferred sound by changing the speakers rather than the amplifier.
Coffee may be similar in that regard—the choice of beans likely matters more than the extraction method itself.

In third-wave coffee shops, especially among younger customers, there is sometimes a fear of seeming ‘not knowledgeable enough.’
I often see serious-looking young people hesitating while ordering.
If more customers felt comfortable simply telling a barista:
‘I don’t like bitter coffee,’ or ‘I’d like to add milk and sugar,’ without feeling self-conscious, specialty coffee culture might attract even more people.
flow by nozy coffee may be exactly the sort of welcoming place that makes specialty coffee feel approachable for beginners.

flow by nozy coffee is the Kyoto branch of the well-known THE ROASTERY by NOZY COFFEE, one of Tokyo’s early pioneers of specialty coffee with an in-house roaster on Cat Street in Harajuku.
The café spans two floors.
Its exterior, meanwhile, fully embraces the distinctly Japanese atmosphere associated with Kyoto.

Another welcome detail is its opening hours: from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Most cafés of this kind tend to close around 5 or 6 p.m.—in Tokyo as well.
After temples and shrines begin shutting their doors in the early evening, having a café where you can unwind before boarding the Shinkansen back to Tokyo feels genuinely invaluable.
It is the perfect stop along my usual walking route through Higashiyama.
And in terms of flavour, the lightly roasted single-origin coffees are very much in line with what I already drink in my everyday life.
Of course, some might say:
 ‘If you’re going all the way to Kyoto, shouldn’t you be drinking the city’s traditional dark-roasted coffee instead?’
And they would not be wrong.
But when travelling starts to wear you down, sometimes you also need a place that helps you reconnect with something familiar.
That, perhaps, is exactly what flow by nozy coffee can become.