Kanbayashi Kanazawa Chaho (上林金沢茶舗)

Kanbayashi Kanazawa Chaho carries the name of Kanbayashi, one of Kyoto's historic Uji tea merchant families, inherited when the Kanazawa shop opened in 1949 with ties to the Maeda clan's Kaga Domain, which had its own long tradition of promoting tea culture in the region. The shop still sources its core matcha, sencha and gyokuro from Uji, and blends in kaga-bocha, a roasted tea associated with the region, alongside more everyday tea for local use. Its main store sits deliberately between two of Kanazawa's main draws - Omicho Market and the Higashi Chaya geisha district - and doubles as a tea house and cafe, serving tea alongside wagashi supplied by the local confectioner Yoshihashi rather than made in-house. Beyond retail and Uji sourcing, the company has grown its own leaf for roughly a decade: a tea plantation on Noto Island in Nanao Bay, near Nanao City, where it produces black tea rather than importing it. That combination - a historic Kyoto merchant name, Uji-sourced green tea, and a smaller home-grown black tea program up on the Noto Peninsula - spans three shops across Ishikawa Prefecture, giving the business both an inherited pedigree and a genuinely local growing operation to back it up.