Zingaro, Nakano Broadway: The Showa Kissaten Takashi Murakami Built

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The second floor of Nakano Broadway runs on fluorescent light and collector fever, and then a neon sign interrupts it. Past the sign: vintage leather sofas, lamps of colored glass, a carpet crawling with psychedelic flowers. Search engines file this room under Zingaro kissaten Nakano Broadway cafe; the sign itself reads 純喫茶ジンガロ, and the first impression is of a coffee house the Showa era forgot to close. Look closer at the carpet before you settle in. The flowers are Takashi Murakami’s.

That detail is the tell. The room is not a survivor from the Showa years; it was assembled, deliberately, to feel like one. Zingaro is produced by Kaikai Kiki, Murakami’s company, and the retro here is not an accident of time but a finished piece of set design. A junkissa, the old no-frills coffee house, is a category that faded with the era. This room is a portrait of one, painted by people who studied the original.

A Zingaro Kissaten Nakano Broadway Cafe Designed, Not Inherited

The interior comes from Hamakura-teki Shoten Seisakusho, the design office behind Ebisu Yokocho, and the craftsmanship is the point. Colored-glass lamps hang over vintage leather sofas that carry someone else’s decades into a room without any of its own. Counter seats face Murakami’s artwork rather than a shelf of siphons. The room quotes the old kissaten vocabulary line by line, then signs its own name at the bottom of the page.

The honest way to visit is to hold both facts at once. As a period room it is fake. As design about a period it is sincere, obsessive, and easy to study over a single cup. Nostalgia here is not preserved; it is manufactured, and the manufacturing is the exhibit.

Tables You Can Play

Every table in the room is a working arcade cabinet from the 1970s. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong glow up through the glass your cup sits on, and the shop provides the coins to play them. This is the detail that separates the Zingaro kissaten Nakano Broadway cafe from Tokyo’s straight-faced retro rooms: the past is not displayed behind glass here. The past is the furniture, and you are invited to press its buttons.

What to Order

The menu plays the same double game. Ohana pudding arrives as a firm custard on a silver dish, a flower-shaped cookie planted on top, bittersweet caramel pooling underneath — the textbook Showa purin, rebuilt under Kaikai Kiki’s flower branding. The cream soda comes in shades a little too vivid to be vintage, with a flower-shaped scoop of ice cream floating where the plain white ball would normally sit.

An ohana pancake rounds out the desserts, and the baked goods near the register, made by Kaikai Kiki’s confectionery brand Tonari no Kaikado, are the version of this room you can carry home in a bag.

Who This Is For

First-timers get one of the easiest wins in the building: dessert and coffee inside a room that doubles as an artwork, with a round of Donkey Kong included in the price of sitting down. Repeat visitors tend to come back for the tables themselves, working through the cabinets one game at a time. Anyone allergic to artifice should know the score in advance, and the rest of the neighborhood’s coffee is mapped in our Nakano guide.

Everyone else should come precisely for the doubleness: the Zingaro kissaten Nakano Broadway cafe is carefully fake, and it says more about how Japan remembers the Showa years than most rooms that are genuinely old.

Practical Information

The Zingaro kissaten Nakano Broadway cafe keeps afternoon hours, noon to seven, with last orders at 6:30pm. Closing days are irregular rather than fixed, per the shop’s page on the official Kaikai Kiki site, so check the official Instagram at @cafe_zingaro before you make the trip. Budget between ¥1,000 and ¥2,000 for dessert and coffee, and free Wi-Fi is available if the arcade tables leave you any attention to spare. From Nakano Station’s north exit the walk takes about six minutes, and the room sits on Nakano Broadway’s second floor.

Zingaro is one stop; the building around it asks for a full afternoon. The floors of dealers and display cases are covered, shop by shop, in the Nakano Broadway guide.