Michele Lin takes her matcha seriously.
The owner of Cherry Hill’s newest dessert café, Ensōra, flew to Japan this past June to tour a matcha farm, sample different teas, and select a strain with the best flavor profile.
“I wanted to bring something authentic and more of a premium matcha to my café,” she said. “I didn’t want to source from any random distributor.”
While she won’t reveal exactly where Ensōra’s matcha comes from — it’s a trade secret — she is promising that it’s top-notch.
Ensōra, which opened last week in the Barclay Farm Shopping Center, is serving up matcha and coffee drinks; soft serve; breakfast sandwiches; and taiyaki, a fish-shaped Japanese cake with sweet and savory fillings.
For Lin, the café is an opportunity to serve Japanese desserts to South Jersey locals without making them drive over the bridge to Philadelphia.
“We focus on bringing people together through our drinks and dessert,” Lin said.
Lin’s background is as a data analyst in the healthcare tech world, but she knows the food industry intimately. Growing up, her family owned a Chinese restaurant where she spent many days and pitched in behind the scenes.
As she was planning to open Ensōra, Lin recipe-tested multiple variations of her taiyaki batter to get a chewy, mochi-like texture rather than the pancake- or waffle-esque batter found in other cafés. The chewier dough is something “unique to the Asian culture,” she said, adding that people really “appreciate that it’s something different.”
The taiyaki come filled with Nutella, black sesame, vanilla, red bean, pandan, or cheese. They can be paired with a rotating soft-serve ice cream. Last week, Ensōra featured a matcha-flavored ice cream. Over the weekend, pumpkin spice and ube were on the menu.
Ensōra is serving a limited menu of breakfast sandwiches, including an egg salad sandwich modeled off the ones sold at 7-Eleven stores in Japan. The “BBB” or Bolo Bao Breakfast sandwich, is served with homemade pork sausage, fried egg, lettuce, spicy mayo, and pickled vegetables, and is sandwiched between two brioche buns with a cookie crust.
Ensōra’s drink lineup includes matcha, drip coffee, espresso, and houjicha tea drinks with creative flavors. Think shaken coconut iced coffee, café su dua (Vietnamese iced coffee) with sweet pandan cream, and strawberry iced matcha lattes. Matcha is exploding in popularity, with retail sales up 86% in the U.S. from three years ago, according to market research firm NIQ.
As Ensōra begins serving customers, Lin says she has a guardian angel of sorts looking over the café. Her late corgi Russell is the café’s mascot and is featured on its logos and decorations.
“We always had wanted to have him as our mascot,” she said. “It was a really tough time when he passed away.”
Now, he’s bringing Ensōra “some good luck.”
Ensōra, 116 Barclay Farms Shopping Center, Cherry Hill, N.J., 08034, instagram.com/ensoranj