Azabu’s Eat More Greens cafe splits people right down the middle into those that love it and those that loathe it. I’m somewhere in the middle. The food they serve is fabulous (with the exception of their falafel, which are limp and embarrassing). The soups, the multi-grain salad, and the taco rice are all worth the trip. The atmosphere is jolly; the terrace is great. But there are two reasons I can’t recommend Eat More Greens as a favourite eatery:

1) We’ll call him Hungry Hiro.

Open kitchens are great, unless you have a ravenous chef who picks at your food while he preps it, sticking chopsticks in, licking them with relish and then shoving the chopsticks back in your food. I don’t want the chef eating my dinner. I don’t want his saliva in my food. It’s not a one-off sight. Doesn’t the fella know he’s on show?

2) The miserly electricity policy

As a freelance writer, I spend my life in cafes. Sometimes I stay an hour and knock out a text, sometimes I stay longer. When cafes are busy, I won’t stay long – no business needs a lone diner hogging a 4-seater table. But when they’re half empty, I often stay for hours, guzzling coffee, then beer, and plenty of food. At Eat More Greens, I rack up bills of between 4,000 and7,000 yen. I like coffee. And beer. And food.

So it’s a little perplexing that customers can’t plug their laptops in. It costs a very small amount of money to keep the laptop crew there drinking. It doesn’t take a great business brain to figure out that in low-traffic hours, a few yen investment to generate thousands of yen profit is quite a good idea. But not to Eat More Greens.

So I don’t go there anymore. If I ask to plug my laptop in at Ben’s Cafe or Respekt Cafe, they say ‘of course’. At the latter, the staff know I need laptop juice sometimes, and call me whenever a seat near a socket opens up. It’s customer service, and it makes the food taste nicer.

When Pita the Great was still around, the owner wouldn’t even let a customer open a laptop in the place – though it’s a take-out joint, and I’ve been ejected from Dhaba India mid-lunch for opening a laptop. I’m not arguing for laptop culture everywhere, but in cafes, in the daytime, it can’t hurt. The electricity costs a tiny fraction of the profit made on a coffee or beer, and when you’re running a place in a creative heartland such as Azabu Juban, drawing people for meetings on the terrace makes a whole lot of business sense. So the campaign starts here: ban Hungry Hiro from dribbling in the food, let us plug our laptops in, and then I can enjoy some of that great food again.

Eat More Greens

2-2-5 Azabu Juban, Minato-ku
Tel 03 3798 3191
Nearest station: Azabu Juban (Oedo, Namboku lines)

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