It's three in the morning in Hamburg and I'm typing in slow English to a farm in Miyazaki. The reply will come back at the end of my workday and the start of theirs. The lot I'm asking about is small — fifteen kilos of first-flush Okumidori from a single field — and I'm not the only buyer. I won't know until tomorrow afternoon whether we got it.
I'm Hillel Lowinsky. I grew up in New York and have been in Hamburg for almost a decade. I opened Lowinsky's on Lehmweg in 2019.
Before any of that, I washed dishes. New York to start, in a restaurant kitchen, and a stint or two more in Hamburg when I first arrived. Hospitality isn't glamorous from the back. The people who pretend otherwise are usually bad at it — busy enough to romanticise the work, never busy enough to be tired.
I came to Germany on what I told myself was a short trip and never went home. The deli food I'd grown up on didn't exist here, and the coffee mostly didn't either. I worked in a few Hamburg cafés, learned the espresso side first, then started taking tea seriously — properly steeped, not bagged — because nobody else was. By the time I opened Lowinsky's, I knew what I wanted to serve. I just couldn't reliably buy it.
The matcha problem became clear within the first year. Decent tea was easy. Consistent, single-origin, high-grade tea I could put behind a counter every day and stand behind was not. The wholesalers importing into Europe were buying at scale, blending lots, and selling to anyone with a credit card. I tasted through what they offered and rejected most of it.
So I started buying directly. Slowly, and with a lot of failures. The first farm I tried to work with took two years to answer an email — by which time the lot I'd been asking about had long since gone elsewhere. The first shipment I did land sat too long in customs in late summer and arrived faintly oxidised; I served it at the café to people who wouldn't have noticed, but I noticed, and I haven't done that since. Now I work with a small group of farms in Miyazaki, Yame, and Shizuoka. I email them at three in the morning because it's afternoon in Japan. I import in small batches because matcha doesn't keep. I reject lots that don't taste right, even when there's nothing else available — which is why we sometimes run out.
That's the catalogue you see in the shop. Eight or nine teas at any time, a few tools, no flavoured syrups, no flavoured powders. No second location, and no plan for one.
The café in Eppendorf is the same project from a different angle. New York–style bagels, properly extracted espresso, and the matcha I import. People come for the bagels and stay for the matcha. People come for the matcha and order a bagel. The seventy-year-old who orders koicha and savours it like a fine whiskey is sitting next to the twenty-eight-year-old who started with a vanilla latte and is now drinking straight usucha. Both are why I'm still doing this.
If you're in Hamburg, come to Lehmweg 36. If you're not, the matcha ships from there every Wednesday.
— Hillel