A Kissaten Loved for Sixty Years: Passing Soleil to the Second Generation

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Just a short walk along Heiwa-dori from the north exit of Nishi-Ogikubo Station stands a kissaten marked by a rabbit-logo sign and windows glowing with warm light. Inside, people ranging from longtime regulars to a younger generation gather and spend time in their own ways.

Nishi-Ogikubo is known for the many old, independently run kissaten that remain in the neighborhood. Yet successful generational succession is by no means common. The story of a long-loved coffee shop closing because there is no successor is familiar not only in Nishiogi, but in neighborhoods everywhere. We have previously interviewed the people behind such historic Nishiogi kissaten as Kokeshiya, Dante, and Donguriya. In many cases—for example, Dante—the shop ended when its founder retired. This time, however, we visited a long-established shop that has reached its sixtieth year and successfully passed into the hands of a second generation: Soleil, tucked behind Heiwa-dori.

The shop is now run by its second-generation owners, Momoe Hirota, together with her cousin Aki-san. After leaving a career in anime computer graphics, she has carefully protected the place she inherited from her mother and aunt. Although she readily admits, “Serving customers makes me nervous,” something of Momoe-san’s sincere and warm personality seems to permeate the atmosphere of the shop. Together with coauthor Kaho Arai, who also works on the floor at Soleil, we spoke with Momoe-san about the shop’s past and present and about her feelings for Nishi-Ogikubo.

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Two Formidable Sisters and a Musician Father

Soleil’s roots stretch back to before the war. Momoe-san’s grandparents lived in Gotanda, where they operated an izakaya. We asked what eventually led the family to open a business in Nishi-Ogikubo. “At the very beginning, it was in Gotanda," said Momoe. "My grandmother had run a business, so they had the desire to go into business themselves.”

Before the war, Momoe-san’s grandparents had operated an izakaya in Gotanda. The business was completely destroyed in an air raid, and the grandparents returned to Yamagata with their daughters, Momoe-san’s mother and aunt. Although the shop was gone, the memory of commerce remained within the family. The sisters grew up repeatedly hearing from their parents how enjoyable running a business had been. They gradually came to imagine that they, too, might one day have a business of their own.

Nishi-Ogikubo was the first neighborhood where Momoe-san’s newly married parents had lived together, and it held happy memories of their early married life. Although they later moved to Shibuya, they chose Nishi-Ogikubo for the business because it was a place where they had spent such enjoyable years. Momoe-san’s aunt followed them to Tokyo, and the three of them opened a kissaten, then a fashionable type of business.

“The first place the two of them—my parents—lived as newlyweds was near the north exit of Nishi-Ogikubo. They wanted to open a shop nearby, so they said, ‘Then why not Nishi-Ogikubo?’ After that, they moved over toward Shibuya… In the end they had moved to Shibuya, but for the shop they chose Nishi-Ogikubo, a place they already knew and felt attached to.”

For Momoe-san’s mother and aunt, memories of their parents’ business in Gotanda, and growing up hearing about the pleasure of running it, naturally developed into the aspiration to open a shop themselves. Nishi-Ogikubo, meanwhile, was a familiar place associated with Momoe-san’s parents’ early married life, and thus became an important setting in which to begin the business.

The sisters who founded the shop were women of remarkable initiative. “Whenever they had any free time, the two of them would immediately go traveling," Momoe said. "They would borrow millions of yen for it and think, somehow it will all work out—as long as they had cash in hand, they would manage. They would just plunge into overseas travel. Sometimes they went on tours, but quite often it was not a tour at all—what do you call it?—they would simply go on their own. Once there, they would find all the places they wanted to visit themselves. Apparently they did that quite a lot.”

The sisters were prepared to borrow money simply to travel independently overseas. That decisiveness became one of the driving forces behind Soleil. Momoe-san’s father, meanwhile, was a jazz musician. “My father was in jazz … well, how should I put it? When various artists came—foreign singers and performers, people like Louis Armstrong—he would play in the back-up band. He also played behind performers on major television music programs. That was the kind of musician he was. So he was away quite a lot. When he was doing music work, he was hardly here at all, and my mother and aunt ran the shop by themselves.”

This is probably why jazz has remained one of Soleil’s principal forms of background music to the present day. An artistic sensibility and the sisters’ formidable vitality. Together, these shaped Soleil in its early years.

A Neighborhood Kissaten That Embodied Its Era

It was the latter half of the 1960s, an era of protests against the Japan–US Security Treaty and a flourishing student movement. Youthful energy swirled through the streets. “What I heard about the old days is that it was very much a product of the times. There were the Anpo protests and the student movement, and it was as if everyone had suddenly awakened. Young people were beginning to feel, ‘We’re going to act according to our own convictions.’ I heard that those kinds of people—young people—came in and out of the shop. I think there were more young customers than older ones. And the two of them were young themselves.”

In such an era, the very fact that young women—and sisters at that—were running a kissaten seems to have struck customers as highly unusual. “There were not many women running food businesses then, except perhaps places like izakaya. So here were two sisters doing it. And they were said to have been beautiful at the time—beautiful sisters. Look at the photographs. They had this confident, fashionable air. Apparently they ran the place with a glamorous image, and some people came because that was so unusual.”

“Back then, the places where young women could work were still mostly small kappō-style restaurants or snack bars with counters," Momoe explained. "Sexism was very strong. It was an era when women did not often step to the front and work under their own authority. So I think that made the shop stand out.”

That novelty helped attract many people. As more women entered public life and part-time work in kissaten became fashionable, students from nearby Tokyo Woman’s Christian University began working at the shop. “Tokyo Woman’s Christian University was nearby, so many of its students worked here part-time, and that brought even more men in. That did happen… It was really a time when women were beginning to assert themselves. Young women were becoming stronger, and the university had that kind of atmosphere too.”

The students wore matching uniforms. “We had matching aprons—pink, blue, and orange, I think. They looked very 1980s. We also had ordinary black aprons specially made with the Soleil rabbit logo here.” The colorful scene must have brightened the streets of Nishi-Ogikubo.

Newspapers, Cigarettes, and Lively Shared Tables

From its founding to the present, Soleil has watched people change with the times. More than thirty years ago, jazz kissaten and classical-music kissaten were commonplace, while nameless little coffee shops run quietly by older couples accompanied people in their everyday lives.

“It feels like such a waste. If those places were still here now, I think they would be tremendously popular. There were classical-music kissaten, and ordinary little coffee shops run by an elderly woman alone, or by an older husband and wife together. There were more of them in the eastern parts of Tokyo, in the old shitamachi neighborhoods—far more on the other side of Shinjuku.”

At the time, smoking was permitted at every table in Soleil, and men accounted for about eighty percent of its customers. Momoe-san recalls similar scenes at nearby institutions such as Donguriya and Kokeshiya. “It was overwhelmingly men. Smoking was allowed at every table—and in fact we permitted smoking everywhere until quite recently. There were some women, of course, but it was really a male world. Men would spread a newspaper wide open, drink coffee while smoking, nod off for a bit, and then go back to work. It had that very masculine atmosphere… There were overwhelmingly many men who came alone. Among the regulars as well, there were many men alone and women alone.”

“In the old days, almost everyone was reading a book or a newspaper. People were not just sitting there vaguely with nothing to do. I think there were more people who came alone and read than people who came together and chatted away.”

It was also a more easygoing era, when strangers routinely shared tables during busy periods. "When I was a student helping out here, it was still completely normal to ask, ‘Would you mind sharing your table?’ More than thirty years ago, you could still ask that. If one person was sitting at a table for four, we might say, ‘Excuse me, would it be all right if we seated another person here?’ and they would say, ‘That’s fine,’ and shift their chair.... Conversations began that way. If they talked a little and happened to get along, they might go on talking and talking, drinking coffee the whole time.”

But the times changed rapidly. With the general move toward indoor smoking restrictions under the revised Health Promotion Act, which came into force in 2020, Soleil decided to make every seat nonsmoking.“We had so many regulars that we kept saying, ‘There’s no way we can ban smoking,’ and carried on as before. But once society as a whole said it was no longer allowed, we could tell people, ‘We’re sorry, but it isn’t allowed here either.’ That finally enabled us to take the step.”

“More people with children began coming too. It may be related—it is very strongly related. But right after we made the change, the number of customers dropped sharply… Until people recognized us as a nonsmoking shop, there was a very difficult period of six months to a year. Some regulars left, while other people still did not know we were non-smoking.”

Momoe-san looked briefly saddened as she recalled that period. Yet after the smoking ban, women and families with children gradually began to visit. The COVID-19 pandemic brought further changes in how people spent time in kissaten. Momoe-san understands the shift in the following way. “It has really only been in the last few years that women and children began coming. Just the last few years. Before that, eighty percent were men. Even over twenty or thirty years—over just twenty years—the people change completely. Communication itself has changed.”

“Yes, there were no smartphones. And COVID was a very major turning point—personal space became decisive. But somehow, I do not think it was only COVID.” The very act of speaking to someone at the next table has also become much less common. “In the old days, it was completely ordinary. Nobody thought anything of it,” Momoe-san recalls.

In an era that places greater value on personal space, people no longer seek only “taste” from a kissaten. “Recently I often feel that people are not necessarily coming because the food is especially delicious. They are coming more for the place, the atmosphere, and the experience… I feel that many women customers value the atmosphere. We mostly serve home-style dishes whose taste people can imagine, so lately I think many people come to experience the place and its atmosphere.”

Soleil is quietly changing from a place characterized by a “culture of shared tables” into a place where people come to experience its space and atmosphere.

From the “Right Job” in Anime CG to Her “Calling” at Soleil

Momoe-san herself has always loved kissaten. “I really love them. I went to all kinds of kissaten, from the shitamachi neighborhoods in the east all the way west to Kunitachi. I loved sitting there, smoking intensely, drinking coffee intensely, and reading intensely.”

Although she loved old streets and alleyways and the kissaten found there, Momoe-san originally had no intention whatsoever of taking over the family business. Because her parents were absorbed in the shop and the family did not go out together on weekends, she had developed a childhood complex about it.

“I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it at all. When I was a child, the people around me had parents who worked for companies and were off on weekends, especially Sundays. Families would go out together on holidays. Parents would always come to classroom observation days and parent-teacher meetings. But our parents were busy, so we did not have that. I hated coming home to an empty house. I had a kind of complex about being from a self-employed family. Even as a child, I wondered, ‘Why does our family have to run a business?’”

As an adult, Momoe-san found what she calls her tekishoku (適職)—work well suited to her—in anime computer graphics and devoted herself entirely to it. But while she was recuperating after her health deteriorated, an accident involving her mother became a major turning point.

“One very significant thing was when my mother fell all the way down the stairs at home. It was a spectacular fall. At the time, she was carrying something connected with the shop—I cannot remember whether it was dishes or sweets. She missed her footing while going down and tumbled all the way to the bottom. She had said before that the stairs frightened her, but that was the first time I truly confronted the fact that she had somehow grown old. I thought, if this place were to disappear, would I really be all right with that?”

“It may have been before I married. When I saw my mother’s aging, I wondered whether I could accept giving the shop to someone else. Could I walk past it after it had become a new shop, a place that had nothing to do with me? I thought, no, perhaps I couldn’t. I would probably no longer want to live in Nishiogi. But this was the place where I had lived since childhood. The thought of having somewhere I could no longer go felt very painful.”

Confronted by this powerful feeling, Momoe-san considered taking over the shop for the first time. She was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine. When we asked about her CG work, she answered emphatically. “It was tremendously enjoyable. I thought it suited me. I thought it was my tenshoku—my calling—but really, it was my tekishoku, the work that suited me. I enjoyed it so much that I did not even notice my health deteriorating. But perhaps my true tenshoku (天職), my calling, was here at Soleil.”

“Honestly, although it may sound strange for me to say this, I’m really not good at cooking. I prefer eating to cooking. What I truly like is having someone else cook and then eating what they make. And although it may be strange to say when I do this kind of work, I don’t much like talking with people. I get very nervous. I don’t have a great many friends. I know that customer service and this sort of work may not suit me. I know that—and yet I think it is my calling. It may not suit me, but I feel this is the work I am meant to do. The previous work was what suited me.”

She gave up her “right job” and chose her “calling.” Beneath her gentle way of speaking lies a clear and powerful determination to preserve the shop.

Momoe-san had helped in the shop since her student days. While recuperating after becoming ill from her CG work, she gradually began taking on preparation and other tasks. For a time, she continued freelance CG work alongside the shop. Gradually, Soleil occupied more of her life, and she increasingly turned down CG jobs. “As I kept doing it, I gradually ended up over here.”

Today, in place of her retired mother, who now requires care, Momoe-san keeps Soleil going with her aunt, who remains active in the shop, and her cousin Aki-san, the other owner. Although the cousins have different personalities, Momoe-san says their ways of thinking and their tendency to become nervous are quite similar. “P-chan [Aki-san] is the type who keeps an eye on many different things at once.”

Napolitan and Soleil’s Historic Cold-Drip Coffee

Soleil’s menu includes curry dating from the shop’s early years, long-loved dishes such as omurice and Napolitan spaghetti, and handmade cakes. In the past, however, the menu was much more varied: the shop served Thai curry and offered three or four different hamburg steaks.

“My mother really loved cooking. In the old days, she served Thai curry here, and there were three or four kinds of hamburg steak. And what else was there? She would bring out a portable trivet, put solid fuel beneath it, and light it with a utility lighter. Then she would place an iron pot on top and simmer something like clam risotto or soup risotto right at the table—bubbling and bubbling—while the customer waited and drank coffee… We did things like that.”

Bringing a trivet and fuel to the customer’s table and simmering clam soup risotto in an iron pot before their eyes—it is an exciting scene even to imagine. Yet to Momoe-san at the time, the proliferation of dishes looked somewhat directionless. “It was certainly interesting to do," she said, "but to me it looked as though they served every idea that occurred to them, then started something else before the previous idea had become established. None of the dishes had time to become a fixture. It might be fine to have one dish like that, but I thought perhaps we should have more standards.”

Momoe-san modestly says she is poor at cooking, but today’s signature dish, Napolitan, arose from her own observation and her experience as a company employee. She remembered that when she worked in the anime industry, her coworkers and senior colleagues invariably ordered Napolitan whenever they went out for lunch. Rather than elaborately named dishes, people selected curry, Napolitan, or omurice—foods whose taste any Japanese customer could immediately imagine. Napolitan was especially popular. When she asked why they liked it so much, they replied, “You want something whose taste you already know. It feels reassuring.”

During a period when sales were difficult, Momoe-san drew on this remark and suggested adding Napolitan. Her mother and aunt strongly opposed the idea. “At first, my mother and aunt were very much against it. They said it was too plain, something people ate at home. ‘We cannot serve in a shop the kind of thing a mother quickly makes at home,’ they said.”

But Momoe-san and her cousin Aki-san insisted that it would be better, and Napolitan was added to the menu. Just as they expected, it quickly became a standard. Her mother and aunt seemed slightly frustrated by the result.

The equally popular shrimp pilaf has been on the menu since the shop’s early years. “Yes, the pilaf has been here from the beginning. It is rather like fried rice.” The same unpretentious generosity and unaffected atmosphere live on in this enduring dish. That warmth may be the most important seasoning in a place loved for so long. Then there are the handmade cakes. Momoe-san’s mother and aunt taught themselves to bake and devised some four hundred recipes by varying and recombining ingredients and finishes.

“My mother and aunt kept creating recipes. There were actually around four hundred in all, but we have inherited nowhere near that many—not even half. Perhaps not even a hundred.” They worked from basic recipes, changing the ingredients and finishes in different combinations. Momoe-san’s mother took great pride in her recipes. “She wrote everything down in notebooks, almost as if saying, ‘Whatever else happens, I am definitely passing these on to you.’ We still consult those notebooks as we make the cakes.”

“To put it positively, we make them rather freely. They are genuinely homemade. None of us is a trained pâtissier. My cousin and I make the bases, and the staff do the finishing. The younger staff and my aunt take turns finishing them. They are not professionally elaborate sweets; I see them as an extension of home cooking, so I ask people to decorate them according to their own ideas.”

Rather than developing entirely new menu items, Momoe-san’s style is to reproduce faithfully the recipes her mother handed down. Her cousin Aki-san, by contrast, is “the type who experiments,” often devising new products and sweets herself. “I’m more the type who faithfully makes what already exists,” Momoe-san says.

Looking across the shop, one sees the enormous cold-drip coffee apparatus that has become a symbol of Soleil. In operation for around forty years, it is the source of the coffee’s deep flavor.

“It takes about ten hours—roughly ten hours for one batch to drip through. One column makes twenty-five servings. It takes ten or twelve hours, and then we set up the next batch.”

The house blends were developed in consultation with a wholesaler during the previous generation. They were designed to retain their aroma when the cold-brewed coffee was reheated and to minimize unwanted flavors. The wholesaler itself underwent a generational transition: after the previous firm closed, younger staff took over its business and continued supplying Soleil.

“The manufacturer still exists, but it no longer makes equipment in this capacity. It has not made this larger size for the last ten years,” Momoe-san explains. Apparatus of precisely this specification is no longer produced.

On the day of the Great East Japan Earthquake, Momoe-san was nearby. Convinced that the shop must have been destroyed, she rushed over. Yet the building, already more than sixty years old, survived, while the delicate tableware and precious cold-drip apparatus were miraculously unharmed.

Because the manufacturer has stopped producing this model, the apparatus is something for which “if it breaks, that’s the end.” Having survived the earthquake, it continues quietly, drop by drop, to make delicious coffee today.

Soleil, Loved by So Many: Warm Connections Passed Down

“The hardest part of management is people.” Momoe-san says her highest priority is finding ways for staff members to work happily and comfortably.... People—people are the issue. How can I make it comfortable for the staff to work here? How can everyone work happily and feel at ease? That is probably the area in which I still have the most to learn. It is so difficult. How can I make sure they do not create unpleasant memories here and can enjoy working?”

The staff may be “what I think about most right now,” Momoe-san continues. Arai, the coauthor of this article and a current floor staff member, nodded deeply at these words. Momoe-san is always quietly attentive to each staff member, making it possible for everyone to work comfortably without overextending themselves. Because of that care, the atmosphere remains calm even on busy days, and the people working there naturally retain a positive attitude. Her boundless warmth reaches the staff, many of whom remain until life changes such as marriage or childbirth take them elsewhere.

“I want them to stay as long as possible. Once we have eaten rice from the same pot, we are like companions. Once someone has worked here, I feel they are part of the group. If we have shared the same food, we are comrades.” In practice, many staff members stay until employment, marriage, or moving away brings a new stage in life. Even after leaving, quite a few return to help when asked. “I do think we have been very fortunate in that way,” Momoe-san says.

Those warm bonds connect Soleil not only with its staff but also with its customers. The shop carries a long history of customer relationships, including a regular who has come for the morning set every day since Soleil first opened.

“He is the same age as my aunt and comes for breakfast every single morning. Even on Saturdays and Sundays, he properly lines up and waits to come in.” These ties extend beyond the shop into Nishi-Ogikubo as a whole. They include the people of the celebrated Kokeshiya, who came almost daily until it temporarily closed at the end of March 2022 for the reconstruction of its aging building. Kokeshiya held its grand reopening in a new building in June 2026.

The fullest expression of these human connections may have been the gallery exhibition marking Soleil’s sixtieth anniversary. For many years, Momoe-san’s mother and aunt avoided publicizing anniversaries because these would reveal their ages. But then came the milestone of sixty years. “It began when the idea suddenly occurred to me. I had forgotten to do anything for the fiftieth anniversary, so I thought we should properly mark an anniversary at some point. In the old days, companies and organizations had tenugui printed with their names and handed them out as promotional items. I thought we should make a Soleil tenugui. I happen to use tenugui myself.”

The project began through a childhood friend, a tenugui designer whom Momoe-san had met again as another mother at her children’s nursery school. The friend designed tenugui and ran a gallery in Nishiogi. The two had lived in the same school district as children but lost contact after graduation. Decades later, they happened to meet again through their children’s nursery school and renewed their friendship as fellow mothers. When Momoe-san asked her to design a tenugui, she immediately replied, “Sure, I’ll do it. That sounds fun.” At first Momoe-san thought, “We are a food business; we have nothing to exhibit.” But her friend proposed contacting the many people who felt attached to Soleil and gathering works from them. She took charge of everything, from producing the exhibition to communicating with contributors. The gallery filled with art inspired by Soleil and memories of the shop.

“Without my knowing it, someone’s life had changed here, people had met one another here, someone had met the person they later married, or had their first date here. All these threads had connected without my being aware of them. I strongly felt that all of it was helping and supporting me.”

Over the past several years, including the pandemic, Momoe-san has become keenly aware of the strength of the shop’s ties with the neighborhood and its people—something available precisely because Soleil has endured for so long. “Even though I am not very good at interacting with people, I have come to feel that in the end I will live with the help of those relationships. My connection with the neighborhood, connections between people and the neighborhood, connections with people—I have been made to realize that this is what I am connected to and how I live.”

Her words convey a deep gratitude toward the neighborhood. How can such profound connections arise in an ordinary kissaten, without even the aid of alcohol? At their foundation lies the personality of her mother, the previous-generation owner, and her remarkable ability to draw people toward her. “My mother certainly has tremendous personal magnetism, this ability to draw people in. Even now, when she goes to day care, she is enormously popular with the staff. Hospital and ward staff become very fond of her too. She somehow has that kind of character. There is no way I can match it. But I would at least like to remain someone who understands those things. I feel I must keep polishing the radar that allows me to notice them.”

“This Is the Highlight of My Life”: An Unvarnished Way of Balancing Work, Childrearing, and Caregiving

Momoe-san, who protects the shop’s legacy, is also the mother of children currently in the fifth grade of elementary school and the first year of junior high school. The severity of raising children while self-employed makes her admit candidly, “I absolutely do not want my children to take over the shop. It is far too difficult.”

“I don’t want them to do it. I absolutely don’t. But even while I feel that way, I wonder whether there might be someone—some younger person who would think in the same direction and work together with me. I imagine I will feel that more strongly when I am older and have less energy.”

Because she disliked having parents who were absent on weekends during her own childhood, Momoe-san now tries to spend Saturdays and Sundays with her children. This is possible because Arai and other staff members carry much of the workload on weekends.

Momoe-san’s daily schedule is dizzying.

“In the morning, after seeing the children off, I care for my mother. She uses adult day care, so I get her ready. On days when I work at the shop, I then come straight here. On days when I do not, I handle accounting and office work or shop for supplies we have run out of. On shop days, I usually work until evening, rush out to buy groceries, and then go home. First I shout, ‘Do your homework!’ at the children while making dinner. By then, my mother returns from day care, so I feed everyone and take care of all sorts of things, and afterward I finish the remaining preparation for the shop. I think everyone with a job has a similar routine, but it is certainly busy.”

Momoe-san met her husband when they worked at the same anime company. He remains in the industry and still works for that company. “His work is so demanding that he is hardly home. But we do not interfere with each other very much, so as long as he is healthy, that is enough,” she says.

Laughing off the fact that her husband’s demanding job leaves her doing most of the parenting alone, Momoe-san says, “This is the highlight of my life. I suppose this is the time when I have to work hardest.”The family still lives very close to Nishiogi. “Our home is just a little way toward Ogikubo—really only two or three, perhaps three or four minutes by bicycle. It helps enormously to be so close.”

Momoe-san herself also lived in an apartment very close to Soleil as a child.“We lived above Neko no Te Shoten. I would come here to pick up the key, or do my homework here before going home. I did my homework at this very table—right here—with my randoseru schoolbag. When I finished, I would leave the bag here and go out to play.”

She attended Takaido Fourth Elementary School, commonly called Takashi, the same school her children now attend. Momoe-san says, “It feels as though they are following the same path.”Just as Momoe-san once placed her randoseru on a table at Soleil and did her homework, her children now attend the local school, growing up under the watchful eyes of the shop and the Nishi-Ogikubo neighborhood. “I have no choice but to throw everything together and somehow do it all at once. That is how I manage.”

Work, childrearing, and caregiving: Momoe-san gives her full energy to all three, supported by the Nishi-Ogikubo community. What remains in the end is surely her unadorned humanity. A sincere consideration for others has passed from mother to daughter. The ineffable warmth filling Soleil is an irreplaceable treasure, created over sixty years by Momoe-san’s own humanity together with the people of this neighborhood.

(James Farrer and Kaho Arai, Sept. 1, 2026, based on an interview conducted March 10, 2026)