Matcha Has Taken Over Miami. I Truly Don't Understand Why.
Matcha took over a cafecito town, and I would like to have a word....
In case you haven’t noticed, matcha — that bright green powder made from ground-up, shade-grown Japanese tea leaves — is all over everything everywhere all the time right now.
Every time I open Instagram or TikTok, someone is whisking green powder with a little bamboo broom in slow motion, set to lo-fi music, making an aesthetic latte. It’s on cafe menus from the Grove to Sunny Isles, and lately it’s even turning up even in…. cocktails?
I understand where the trend comes from, the whole Gen Z wellness “clean girl” era, and I am neither Gen Z nor a wellness girly, so maybe this was never going to be my moment. But somehow matcha has taken over an entire city of coffee (or better yet, cafecito) drinkers and….I can’t, for the life of me, understand why?
Whenever I tell people I don’t love matcha, the very first response is ALWAYS the same version of:
“Oh, Olee, you just haven’t had it made the right way!”
“You just haven’t tried the [insert wild name here] blend.”
“How it’s prepared is so important.”
The thing is, I have had it in the country that invented it, and back here at some of the places South Florida considers the best of the best, all names you would recognize. I’ve ordered the ceremonial grade. I’ve ordered the super rare unique version with toasted sesame in it. I’ve also ordered the versions with the banana bread syrup and the honey cold foam and whatever else they’re stacking on top these days. I could go on…..
And obviously, the syrupy versions taste better — mostly because they do a good job of covering up the matcha. Because matcha, to me, tastes like the wheatgrass shots we were all pounding in the early 2010s. (Elder millennials know what I’m talking about.) We’d close out the bar at lord knows what time, roll into work at 9am, and throw back a little green shot of lawn clippings for wellness reasons and tell ourselves it erased all of our sins from the night before. (It did not.) It was silly then, and we knew it. To me, matcha is that same grassy, vegetal flavor, except now it comes with oat milk and a $12 price tag.
And to be clear, none of this is a knock on the places making it. The matcha I've been served around town is clearly the good stuff, well sourced, made by people who take it seriously. I can tell I'm drinking a quality version of the thing.
I just don't like the thing.
Then there’s the whole wellness pitch. The claims of the gentler caffeine, the “clean energy,” the l-theanine, something about glowing skin. Turns out the science isn’t exactly on their side here. Coffee Intelligence looked at the research last fall and found that matcha’s health claims remain unproven — while unsweetened coffee, the drink matcha was supposed to save us from — has stronger scientific backing for cardiovascular benefits. And once you’ve added the syrups and foams that make matcha drinkable, whatever health math you were doing is out the window anyway.
Give me the coffee flavor profile any day of the week. It’s a million times better, and as it happens, it’s better for me too. And this isn’t coffee snob talk, I’m not out here lecturing anyone about single origin anything. But I do know a good cup of coffee from a K-cup version, and either one beats the grass matcha.
So drink your matcha, if you desire. If a wheatgrass latte is what you need to get through your afternoon slump, then you do you, boo. All I’m asking is that the next time I say matcha isn’t for me, you skip the speech about the matcha types and ceremonial preparations.
I’ve had the ceremony. I’d still rather have the cortadito.