Café Gitane Tokyo

The Ebisu room

The Tokyo branch sits on a quiet street just south of Ebisu Station, near the Margiela boutique. It is a larger and brighter space than the Nolita original: high ceilings, a spacious terrace, and an indoor terrace with floor-to-ceiling glass that keeps the room bright through the day. There is a private room at the back with its own audio input.

The menu is the most expansive of any Gitane location: the New York signatures carried over intact, and a second layer of dishes built for Tokyo was added on top of them.

What to order in Ebisu

The Tokyo branch is the only Gitane location where the menu genuinely expanded rather than contracted, so the ordering strategy is different from New York.

If you came for the original: the avocado toast and the merguez couscous with raisins and pine nuts are the two dishes that carried over essentially unchanged from Mott Street. Salmon tartare is the third.

If you came for Tokyo: the forty-day dry-aged rib-eye and the grass-fed burger are the things a Nolita regular would not recognise, and are the reason the Ebisu room reads as a restaurant in the evening rather than a cafe. Kale and fig salad and truffle-oil fries sit between the two registers.

Dessert is baked cheesecake or the hot fudge, both of which long-standing customers order without much deliberation.

There is a house cocktail list running to around a dozen drinks, from mimosas to a Yamazaki whisky old fashioned — a very Tokyo answer to a very New York wine list. Gluten-free options are marked.

The detail worth knowing: at lunch the kitchen runs Japanese-style sets, so the avocado toast arrives with soup and salad included at a set price. The dish that became a symbol of unaffordable brunch is, in Ebisu, part of a reasonably priced lunch special.

Practical details

• Address: 1-16-11 Ebisu-Minami, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
• Nearest station: Ebisu — Yamanote, Saikyo, Shonan-Shinjuku and Hibiya lines
• Style: all-day cafe and restaurant, terrace seating, English menus and English-speaking staff
• Rooms: street terrace, indoor terrace with floor-to-ceiling glass, and a private room at the back with its own audio input

Published hours have generally run from late morning to midnight, with later closing on Friday and Saturday. As with every location, treat any listed hours as indicative and confirm before travelling.

The neighbourhood around it

Ebisu rewards the walk. The cafe sits a few minutes south of the station on a quiet street, close to the Margiela boutique, in a pocket of design studios and small independent shops rather than the department-store density further north. Daikanyama is a short walk west and is the natural continuation of an afternoon that starts here; Ebisu Garden Place is the other direction.

The practical point for visitors: this is a neighbourhood that runs late. A midnight closing time is normal rather than notable, and the cafe's usefulness as an all-day room — the thing that defined it in Nolita — translates better in Ebisu than it would in most of Tokyo.

Why Tokyo made sense

The Nolita cafe had been a fixture on the fashion circuit for two decades by 2017, and Ebisu is a neighbourhood with a similar centre of gravity — design studios, boutiques, a clientele that reads a room before it reads a menu. The transplant worked because what was being exported was never really the food. It was the idea of a cafe you can sit in for three hours.

It is now, along with Vinegar Hill, one of the two places the Gitane kitchen still operates.