Kawaii Café

Kawaii Café sits on Lilienblum Street, in the old banking quarter at the edge of Tel Aviv’s city centre — a small, pastel-walled room that opened at the end of 2024 as the sweet-shop counterpart to Kimchi’s, the pioneering Korean restaurant a few doors down. If Kimchi’s brought Tel Aviv its bulgogi and tteokbokki, Kawaii is where the same kitchen does the other half of the East Asian table: coffee, matcha, hand-made buns and a wall of imported snacks.

The café is the work of Suni Kim, the Korean owner of Kimchi’s, who wanted to round out what she had built. “I wanted to bring here the flavours I remember from home,” she has said — “not only the barbecue and the cooked food, but also the coffee, the pastries and the other sweets associated with Japan and Korea.” Kimchi’s had already become one of the hardest tables to book in the city; Kawaii extended that project sideways into a daytime space that you can simply walk into.

The drink to order is the Korean dalgona coffee (around 18 NIS) — the whipped-coffee phenomenon that went viral worldwide, made properly here so that both the coffee crown and the milk beneath it are aerated into something closer to dessert than a flat white. Alongside it the short menu runs to ceremonial-style matcha, a Vietnamese-style coffee with condensed milk, plain filter coffee from about 11–14 NIS, and Japanese teas. The food cabinet is the other reason to come: taiyaki, the fish-shaped filled pancakes; melon pan and other soft, glazed Japanese buns; animal-shaped buns shaped like pandas and piglets, filled with red-bean paste, black sesame or chocolate; and tall, airy matcha and pumpkin-spice cloud cakes by the slice. A side wall is stacked with snacks, candy and brightly coloured drink bottles brought in from Japan and Korea — the kind of stock that is otherwise hard to find in Israel.

It is a genuinely small place, with a handful of round tables, so it works best as a stop-in rather than a sit-for-hours café; hours have settled into a long daily shift (closed Sundays). For the city’s Japanese and Korean communities — and the much larger crowd of Israelis who found this food through K-dramas, anime and TikTok — it is a low-key, unpretentious anchor: somewhere to pick up a familiar snack, try the coffee everyone has seen online, and not need a reservation to do it.