Nana's Green Tea, Japan's Largest Matcha Chain, Has Arrived in the United States

While American coffee chains were busy adding matcha lattes to their menus with varying degrees of seriousness about what actually goes into one, Nana's Green Tea was quietly building Japan's most significant matcha cafe brand. Founded in Tokyo in 2001, the chain now operates around 80 locations across Japan and has an established presence in Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It has just opened its first flagship in the United States, in Pasadena, California, with locations in Boston, Idaho, and Northern California confirmed to follow.

The sourcing separates Nana's Green Tea from the broader matcha trend that has taken hold globally. The chain uses exclusively matcha from Yamamasa Koyamaen, a tea producer based in Uji, the city south of Kyoto that has been producing Japan's finest matcha since the Kamakura period and whose history we have covered in detail previously on Style Essentials. Yamamasa Koyamaen's history extends back to the Edo period, making it one of the oldest and most respected names in Japanese tea production. Other Japanese teas on the menu, including genmaicha and hojicha, are sourced from Baisa Nakamura, a specialist tea supplier with its own deep roots in Japanese tea culture. The sourcing is not incidental to the brand. It is the brand.

The menu reflects the full breadth of Japanese cafe culture rather than reducing it to a single drink. Matcha appears across lattes, soft serve, ice cream, and elaborate layered parfaits of the kind that have defined Japanese cafe dessert culture for decades but remain genuinely difficult to find outside Japan. The matcha mochi parfait layers matcha jelly, vanilla soft serve, corn flakes, shiratama mochi, matcha ice cream, red bean paste, and whipped cream into a single glass. The hojicha parfait follows the same architecture but substitutes hojicha for matcha throughout and uses warabi mochi, made from bracken starch rather than glutinous rice, in place of the shiratama. Selected locations also serve yoshoku dishes, the Japanese-Western hybrid cuisine that includes katsu curry served with miso soup.

Nana's Green Tea currently has US locations in Seattle, New York City, Las Vegas, and Honolulu alongside the new Pasadena flagship. Further expansion is confirmed. 

Explore: nanasgreenteaus.com