When Amit Chhetri opened a coffee roastery and cafe adjacent to Todoroki Valley in a quiet corner of Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward in the summer of 2020, during the height of the pandemic, his friends told him he was crazy.
“Although I understood my friends’ reactions, my attitude was that things happen all the time in this world, and you cannot just stop living,” says Chhetri. “Owning my own cafe was my dream, so I decided to take the challenge.”
Today, Chhetri’s Yeti Roastery Coffee is a rising star on the local coffee scene. When I visited on a recent weekday, his cafe was filled to capacity with customers flocking to savor Japan’s only Himalayan specialty coffee, which he serves farm-to-cup.
Chhetri, 45, sources his beans from Coffea arabica shrubs that he himself has planted and hand-picked along with his team on his own coffee farm in the mountains of his native Nepal, where he travels during both the planting and harvesting seasons.
The result is a clean, bright taste with fruity notes, borne of the region’s fresh natural mountain water and high altitude — along with Chhetri’s ultra-strict specifications at every stage of the coffee-making operation. Following an 18-day drying process in Nepal and meticulous selection and roasting of only the highest-grade beans in Japan using his Diedrich specialty roaster, each cup is then finally poured lovingly atop his cafe’s dark marblewood counter.
Chhetri’s menu encompasses a range of tastes for coffee lovers of all types: rich lattes, signature drinks such as a refreshing coffee lemonade reminiscent of espresso tonic and a lineup of hand-dripped coffees including a rum-infused blend, which evaporates the entire alcohol content during the roasting process — leaving behind a concentrated flavor of deep, smoky notes.
Having mastered the roasting process through a combination of self-study and seminars, Chhetri has also achieved the rank of Q-Grader from the Coffee Quality Institute — equivalent to a “sommelier of coffee,” he says — via a rigorous examination involving the inspection of raw, green coffee beans for defects such as insect damage and insufficient drying, and grading roasted beans in 10 categories including aroma, acidity and aftertaste. The specialty coffee designation is given only to those beans earning 80 out of 100 points.
Chhetri had not always dreamed of embarking upon a coffee journey. Growing up in Delhi, India, where he attended an English-language military school due to his father’s job as an electrical and mechanical engineer in the Indian army, he was on track to become a professional soccer player — until his dream was thwarted by a spinal cord injury he sustained during a match at age 16.
“I was told I would never play again,” Chhetri says. “I was actually able to make a full recovery after surgery due to my long-standing yoga practice, but I was out of the game for three years, which ended my hopes of a professional career.”
After a stint working for an event management company in Delhi, Chhetri returned to Nepal to work as a travel consultant for inbound tourism in Kathmandu. While coaching youth soccer on the side, it was during a match with the Kanagawa Prefecture-based Yuasa Soccer Club that he first connected with Japan. Those ties would later result in a job offer to move to Fujisawa and coach youth soccer in English in 2013.
“It was part-time work with good pay, and since I had time afterwards, I started exploring more cafes and kissaten (traditional coffee shops),” he recalls. “I had always loved drinking cafe lattes in Delhi, and I was really intrigued by the hand-dripped coffee style I saw here in Japan.”
In 2016, he quit his soccer job altogether to pursue a career related to his deepening passion for coffee. After landing a job at the Classic House at Akasaka Prince, he began experimenting with inventive concoctions like peanut butter lattes. He also made important connections with colleagues working in the food and drink industry — many of whom went on to launch their own establishments. After around two years, Chhetri realized that he, too, wished to open his own cafe.
In 2018, Chhetri began shoring up his coffee bonafides: He secured a cafe business license, studied roasting in Vietnam and procured his first roaster. In 2019, he rented space in his friends’ Coaster Craft Beer & Kitchen in Shimokitazawa, where he began roasting beans and selling coffee in the mornings before the restaurant opened.
“Coffee has around 800 different components — as opposed to wine’s 100 — and the same coffee beans will taste totally different depending on the roasting and brewing processes,” he observes.
Chhetri reminisces on his long journey to refine his coffee-making techniques, including a six-month experiment on cold-brew extraction methods.
“Coffee beans are affected by the daily changing temperatures, and there are also long periods of waiting involved,” he explains. “I experimented until I achieved what I felt was the right acidity and aroma. Even if you study under someone else, in the end you have to create your own style.”
Along the way, Chhetri came to realize that few in Japan’s coffee industry knew much about coffee in Nepal — or even that coffee was grown there.
“Nepal has rich soil and a huge potential for growing coffee in its mountains, which are also unbelievably gorgeous,” he says. “But it can be quite dangerous and scary to grow coffee on the side of a mountain and to navigate the bumpy local roads.”
Chhetri cites the language barrier as the major reason why Nepalese coffee has not penetrated into Japan. He began working as a consultant to coffee farms in Nepal, but after purchasing a batch of coffee beans from farmers in the west-central Bagmati Province and being unable to sell them due to defects, he realized that to achieve his vision of selling Himalayan specialty coffee in Japan, he had to purchase his own farm and teach people how to grow coffee beans to the appropriate specifications. Around that same time, he learned of an older couple in Bagmati’s Kavrepalanchok district who wanted to sell their farm.
“They were already growing coffee, which was perfect for me since otherwise I would have had to wait four or five years for the first crop,” he recalls. “It was like some god was helping me.”
More serendipity followed: When Chhetri returned from a trip visiting coffee farms in Nepal and Vietnam in February 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Japan to close its borders the very next day.
“I still get goosebumps whenever I think about it,” he says.
Today, Chhetri operates his organic farm with only natural pesticides. He also practices direct trade, paying above-standard wages to his team of local farmers, who take on the task of producing quality coffee beans amid arduous mountain conditions. He also regularly plants trees on his farm, which helps avoid the landslides prevalent in the precariously steep region while also providing the shade that Arabica coffee plants require..
“To grow coffee in Nepal, you essentially have to create your own jungle,” Chhetri explains.
His father, who began farming after retirement as a means of dealing with the emotional toll from his military service, also has a farm in the south-central Chitwan district — an area that Chhetri describes as having “lions, rhinos, elephants and every kind of tropical fruit you can imagine.” The coffee plants his father is now growing will be transplanted to Chhetri’s farm next season.
In the future, Chhetri plans to continue selling his specialty coffees and baked goods at his cafe together with his small international team, while also selling his beans to other roasters in Japan. Next year, he will also begin serving anaerobic coffee fermented without oxygen, which he describes as “a new trend of sharp, sweet, high-intensity coffee whose taste lingers for a long time.”
Chhetri sums up his vision of bringing Himalayan culture to Japan under the theme of “ocean meets mountains” — a reference to the island nation of Japan and landlocked Nepal, with the latter represented by the mythological beast from which Yeti Roastery takes its name.
“The yeti is an enormous creature whom (Nepalese people) believe is the protector of the Himalayas and lives behind the fishtail-shaped Machhapuchhre mountain, which no human has ever summited,” Chhetri says. “The yeti is huge and scary, which represents the harsh and risky atmosphere where we grow our beans. But he is also sweet and soft inside, like the taste of our coffee. It is a perfect symbol.”
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.