There’s something so clean and refreshing in the taste of green tea which I absolutely like. Other people find the “lasang dahon” too weird so I guess it’s an acquired taste.
To my fellow green-leafy-goodness lovers in QC, Kozui – that small café and restaurant along Tomas Morato – might just be our green tea heaven.
Kozui’s green tea ice cream tastes and looks the way TV commercial-worthy ice cream should be – dreamy. It has the right combination of the smooth cream, milky sweetness, slightly bitter green tea taste, and summery light green color.
Another favorite is the tiramisu, done Kozui-style with matcha green tea powder sprinkled on top of it. Sugar rush with potent antioxidants. Nice.
On a more recent trip to Kozui with officemates, it was a delight to try out the other menu items and find that there’s more to the restaurant than green tea. “Totoong pagkain” as I call filling savory food, excluding desserts and sweets. Kozui offers very affordable and creative Japanese food which is definitely more than the usual tempura, sushi, and maki saturating the Japanese-inspired restaurants in the city.
Spinach soup, a bowl of scary looking greenish brew, is far from vile. It’s surprisingly delicious and very filling. It’s quite a steal considering that a bowl worth only P120 could already feed three people. (No, we weren’t on a diet.)
DanDan noodles is a great Japanese version of the Chinese Szechuan noodles. It’s served cold like a salad so the spicy flavors of ginger and chili pepper really pop out. The 2-in-1 noodle-salad dish is at once cold, hot, garlicky, savory, crunchy (thanks to cucumber and bean sprouts), and decidedly chunky (thanks to scallions). A plateful costs only P158.
Other delicious choices for “totoong pagkain” are korokke mix (potato balls mashed and deep-fried with another leaf-flavored favorite, spinach), takoyaki (streetfood fare of squid-and-leek balls flavored with nori), and karaage chicken wrap (grilled pita wrap bursting with chicken chunks, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, and onions with black sesame dressing).
Using black sesame dressing in the chicken wrap is brilliant. The comforting taste of the usual honey mustard dressing stops being amusing after so many salads.
Kozui Green Tea is at 258 B Tomas Morato corner Scout Fernandez, Quezon City. It’s very near Bang Café, which is more noticeable because it has a bigger, red signage. Contact number of Kozui (not Bang, hahah 
) is 413-2705.
My stash of tea: (left to right) matcha powdered green tea, sencha tea, sencha tea but with nicer packaging, and cherry blossom tea (which is obviously not green tea but bought it in Kyoto just the same for "sentimental reasons")
