Tired of walking 20 minutes for matcha? Ooika is coming to Nassau — although it’s unclear when

For matcha enthusiasts on and beyond campus, Ooika on 300 Witherspoon Street has created a stir of excitement through its commitment to serving traditional matcha made with Tencha leaves ground with in-house mills. Now, the budding chain is expanding to 84 Nassau Street with a completely different look, bringing its high-quality matcha much closer to campus. And yes, they are open to hiring Princeton students.

In an interview with The Daily Princetonian, founder Marc Falzon explained that this distinction between each shop’s location is a deliberate effort to reflect the atmosphere of the place it inhabits. The new Nassau location will deliver a more upscale, luxury aesthetic with the shop’s “sunset” interior theme that pays homage to Princeton orange. The current ceiling — leftover from the former Proof Pizza, which closed last August — will be stripped away to reveal the original 1920s Art Deco metal ceiling, tied to the vibrant history of Nassau Street.

But Ooika’s journey to Nassau Street has not been smooth. While the Nassau location was initially set to open in November, the timeline has now been pushed back to an unknown date. At a recent visit, the shop remained unfinished, with debris littering the interior and wires protruding from the walls.

Although Ooika’s opening on Nassau will mark the matcha company’s third store in only a year-and-a-half, Falzon explained that the Nassau location was actually originally intended to be Ooika’s second shop. It was only while the Ooika team was waiting for the Nassau location to be finalized that Falzon happened to be at TigerLabs co-working space (300 Witherspoon Street, Suite 201). There, he met the owner of the suite below, previously Sakrid Coffee Roasters, who offered Falzon the space, prompting the birth of Ooika’s unexpected second location on Witherspoon.

However, Falzon isn’t concerned about the proximity of the two locations. “This location [Witherspoon] is not walkable but drivable. That location [Nassau] is walkable, not drivable. So it attracts different clientele,” he told the ‘Prince.’

Ooika’s newest store will maintain similar offerings as the other locations, with the potential to reduce the menu. This initiative is inspired by Falzon’s belief: “we don’t need to do everything. The more we do, the less perfectly we can do it.” The cafe recently cut the customer-favorite “cloud foam,” a whipped drink topping, because of the time it took baristas to weigh out and shake the foam.

“I thought, instead of them doing that, I’d rather they have a conversation,” he said.

Ooika’s deliberately small menu is further observed in its decision to exclusively offer oat milk at the new Nassau location. For Falzon, this decision stems from the desire for Ooika to sell customers a matcha latte that costs the same as one from anywhere else, despite the expensive in-house machines they use to grind their matcha fresh, the hiring and training required of staff, and the maintenance of the machines and storess. A regular matcha latte at Ooika costs $8, compared to $8.50 at Small World.

“I can either offer two kinds of milk to make five percent of my audience care, or I can lose five percent of my business and reduce my cost from the other 95 percent by massive margins by buying only one milk with such huge quantities that I can reduce the cost of volume,” Falzon said.

“Our drinks should cost $12, but I can get it to be reasonable by reducing complexity … I can’t have everything, so what I choose to sacrifice is everything, and just keep the basics,” he said.

Navya Kommu is a contributing writer for The Prospect from Tallahassee, Fla. She is a member of the Class of 2028 and can be reached at nk1599[at]princeton.edu.

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