Sawada Coffee Should Be Better Than This

The pedigree here is real. Hiroshi Sawada is a Japanese barista and latte art champion who opened this as his first U.S. cafe in the West Loop in 2015. The expectations walking in are high and they are earned by his background. Which makes what actually happens in the cup so frustrating to write about.

The beans are Metropolis, roasted out of Avondale. Metropolis is solid without being a breakthrough roaster in this city, but solid is enough to work with if the baristas do their job. The baristas at Sawada are not doing their job. Hot, separated, bitter. The kind of execution that makes good beans taste like a different product entirely. The military latte, their signature drink, underdelivered in the same way. For a cafe founded by someone whose entire reputation is built on precision and craft at the highest competitive level, the inconsistency is genuinely shocking.

The matcha fares better, which tracks given Sawada's Japanese background and the care that tends to go into that program. It is not particularly special but it is handled more carefully than the coffee, which at this point is not a high bar to clear.

The baked goods come from Doughnut Vault, part of the same Hogsalt Hospitality group that owns Sawada. They are fine. They do not save anything.

The space is interesting — an old gym, with seating along the risers and the coffee bar perched at the top. The gym floor seating belongs to Green Street Smoked Meats, another Hogsalt restaurant, which means it's off limits for Sawada customers. That's a reasonable business decision and GSSM earns its space. But it limits seating for a cafe that draws a thirty-minute line on a Saturday morning, which is a painful combination when the coffee at the end of that line doesn't justify the wait.

Don't wait in that line.