A Japanese Chain Opens on Crescent With Ramen and Piles of Matcha

A Japanese matcha chain has settled in Montreal: Tsujiri is open on Crescent Street as of today (December 9).

The chain announced its expansion to Quebec over a year ago, and eventually opted for the former site of Italian restaurant Via Crescent.

There’s a serious volume of green tea on the menu, in a variety of formats — there’s regular brewed matcha (and a couple of other tea varieties, such as sencha), and relatively common options like a matcha latte.

But the menu goes above and beyond the obvious — the lattes can be twisted up with additions like black sesame, and there are also matcha floats (topped with matcha soft serve, of course), shaved ice desserts, cakes, macarons, and cream puffs. That’s not to mention parfaits, and a rather literal menu item named “cake blended” which is cake blended into some kind of matcha milkshake.

For the less-thirsty, there’s a short menu of savoury food, including a tonkotsu ramen with pork and — you guessed it — green tea noodles.

Despite the decidedly modern menu, Tsujiri as a tea company has been around a long time — since the mid-19th century, developing a focus on high-quality green tea sourced from the Uji area, near Kyoto. It’s actually not a huge player in Japan — more of its locations are elsewhere in east Asia, in places like China and Hong Kong.

Tsujiri is in the midst of modest expansions throughout Canada right now — while it has had Toronto-area locations for some time now (as well as newer locations in Edmonton and outside Vancouver), franchises in Halifax and Calgary are also in the works.

STATUS — Tsujiri is open at 1418 Crescent Street, hours TBA.

• Tsujiri Canada [Official]
• Japanese Matcha Café Chain Looks to Settle in Montreal [EMTL]