Oliver Strand recently offered a good peek into the emerging coffee scene in Tokyo (which, curiously enough, did not elicit hundreds of responses from Japanese chauvinists like the one about espresso in Paris):
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/ristretto-tokyo-coffee/
A couple of the places he mentions are there because they're on all kinds of lists, for example Daibou is on every list but I never managed to get a good cup of coffee there, just burnt oil slicks. Maybe I should try again.
We tried Streamer on a previous visit, and again this week. The espresso is very much in the style of some Counter Culture blends, but the drinks are very milky (the latte feels like a gallon of milk, the cappuccino is a latte, even the macchiato is too much for me) and there's something very right wing about the aesthetics (camouflage donuts, Kyokujitsu-ki motif t-shirts). Very good but not really my thing.
Omotesando Koffee is amazing - the entire operation is one guy standing inside a cubic metal frame placed in an old Japanese house. He makes very good espresso drinks from Ogawa beans and a kind of cubic cannele and that's it. I believe he initially intended this to be a temporary location as the house was supposed to be torn down next month, but he just got another year or two on his lease.
Nozy Coffee, also very good - they roast their own beans and they offer a daily selection of single origin beans for espresso. Of the two we tried - one from Costa Rica and the other from somewhere I couldn't parse from the Japanese pronunciation, one was excellent, well rounded with slight hints of mocha, the other was too acidic and flat.
Madeleine - quirky even by Tokyo standards, an espresso bar operated from the back of a Citroen 2CV, where the owner crouches for 4 hours on most days and serves espresso from a manual machine. The weakest of the bunch but still fine.
