Milli by Metric — Metric Coffee’s second location, an all-day café at Kedzie and Barry in Avondale — is a really great shop. No surprise on the coffee, because it’s Metric. No surprise on the tea either, because the matcha is Spirit Tea — Then & Now, last time I checked.

Here’s the part worth knowing before you order. They call straight matcha the matcha neat: matcha and water, nothing else. Order that, not the latte. This is a delicate powder, and a latte flattens exactly the thing that makes it good — the milk doesn’t lift it, it covers it. The latte is fine. The neat pour is the drink.

That’s not the usual advice. Most café matcha is built to survive milk, and telling you to skip the latte would be telling you to drink something thin. Not here.

The specialty drinks are a step below. The Tulsi Tonic — tulsi is a Spirit Tea herbal, used in herbal medicine — is light and herbal with lemon and ginger: good, not great, worth ordering once. A fruit-forward iced matcha on an earlier visit landed in the same place. A specialty hot matcha latte last winter didn’t leave enough impression to reorder, which is its own verdict. None of that is the tea’s fault; even the merely-fine drinks are well made.

Drinks run the usual spread here — a few dollars for something straightforward, up around ten for the specialty builds — which puts Milli with the rest of the city’s upscale cafés rather than above them. A little surprising, given how polished the room is.

The one real knock: the layout flows well but doesn’t greet you. Staff have no direct sightline to the door, so there’s rarely a hello walking in or a goodbye walking out. Small thing. It just leaves the room a touch cold.

One more, because it’s a good one: this building is the restaurant-under-construction in The Bear — the scene where Syd walks through a gutted space. It was filmed here while the place genuinely was a construction site, before it became Milli.

Matcha drinks: 4/5. Get the neat.

Tomokohi is a small coffee-and-tea shop at Damen and Armitage in Bucktown, and the thing I like about it is that it isn’t trying to impress you. No flourish, no spectacle — just a shop quietly getting a latte right. That restraint is the whole review: the drinks are un-flashy in the same way the room is, and more often than not they nail the fundamentals of a good matcha or coffee latte.

The matcha is Rishi. That tells you the ceiling: it’s a solid latte-grade powder, good enough once there’s a little sugar in the cup, and not something you’d order straight and expect a bowl of ceremonial tea. Judged as a latte base — which is how it’s meant to be judged — it does its job. The tea board sits in the five-to-seven-dollar range, matcha at the lower end of it: neighborhood-cafe pricing rather than destination pricing, and fair for what’s in the cup.

This visit they had a “Summerween” special menu on, a spooky-summer thing, and I went for the Witches Breeze Lemonade: house-made lemonade, coconut syrup, matcha on top. Worth clearing up what the coconut is, because I wasn’t sure at first — it’s syrup, not coconut water. The sign says as much, and the cup confirms it: there’s a faint suntan-lotion note that only ever comes from coconut flavoring, never from the real thing.

And I liked it — I want to be clear about that before the criticism, because the drink is good. It’s just a little tart and not quite balanced. Close. Almost there, not all the way. Call it a 3 out of 5 in a café I’d give a 4.

Last fall they had a banana matcha latte that was genuinely lovely, so the specials can land — this one just landed a step short. That’s the pattern here: the seasonal drinks are usually good-enough rather than great, and the everyday lattes are where the shop is most itself.

If you’re near Damen and Armitage, it’s a safe, easy stop. Order a straight matcha or coffee latte and you’ll get the best of what they do; treat the seasonal specials as a fun maybe. Café: 4/5. Witches Breeze: 3/5.

On the way in I asked the couple walking out where their drinks were from and whether they were any good. Long pause. “Ehh — not the best.” Then he chimed in: “because hers isn’t sweet. Mine’s sweet, and it’s pretty good.”

That was the review, delivered on the sidewalk, before I’d ordered anything. It turned out to be exactly right.

isshiki sells its two cultivars separately — Samidori and Yabukita, each as its own shot — and blends them for everything else on the menu. A café that will name the cultivars and then let you taste them apart is a café that has thought about matcha. That’s becoming more common, but it’s still rarer than it should be, in New York or anywhere.

I ordered the iced coconut water matcha, about $9 with tip — the matcha arrived warm only because they pour it straight onto the cold coconut water. No milk and no sugar to hide behind. It’s the safest honest test of a shop’s powder: sip the matcha straight off the top, and if it disappoints, stir it in and let the coconut water carry it. It didn’t disappoint. The grassiness reads Yabukita, and there’s a sweetness underneath that I’d guess is the Samidori — though nobody told me the house blend is what’s in this cup, so treat that as a guess.

What doesn’t work is the texture. It’s gritty. Not catastrophically, but the grain is there on every sip, and that’s either the grind or a whisk that never fully took. It is the one thing standing between this and a place I’d send people to.

Sweetness doesn’t remove the grit — nothing does — it just makes it forgivable, because nobody judges a cold sweet drink the way they’d judge a bowl of tea. So the sweet menu is fine here, and the couple on the sidewalk sorted themselves accordingly: his was sweet, and it was pretty good. Don’t come here for the straight shot. It isn’t bad, it’s middling, and there is too much matcha in this city to spend a straight pour on middling.

One caution. I asked whether the “cloud” topper is dairy-free. The first answer was “yes, there’s no lactose.” The second, when I asked oat or coconut, was “I think it’s made with vanilla.” I never got a straight answer, and I couldn’t spot what they were pouring from either. So I still don’t know what’s in it — and if you’re avoiding dairy, neither do you. Order something else, or get someone to show you the carton.

Rating: 4/5. Real cultivars, real intent, an unfinished grind.

Sizes are dosed 5g (0.18 oz) / 6g (0.21 oz) / 7g (0.25 oz) — generous, and they’ll tell you the number, which is its own good sign.

Has anyone had the Samidori shot on its own here? I want to know whether the grit is the powder or the prep.