Phagomania: Milking It

Phagomania comes over all giddy at the sight of a cat made of milk jumping out of a coffee cup, as we look at the work of Kazuki Yamamoto

Feature by Peter Simpson | 07 Nov 2014

Coffee’s great, isn’t it? It’s full of dairy and caffeine, so it makes you feel full and hyped-up at the same time. Image-wise, it’s developed the same ‘grown-up’ too-cool-for-school vibe that craft beer had about a year ago, so you can stroll around with a cup in your hand and people will think you're a hip, happening kind of person. Yet it’s still perfectly acceptable to put whole handfuls of sugar into your drink without being shouted at. Nice coffee is brilliant. That said, the latte art that sits on top of your nice coffee can be a bit lame.

If your drink isn’t adorned with a bloody fern, the ubiquitous mark of the technically-proficient barista that doubles up as a reminder that it’s nearly Christmas, then you’ll be staring into a cup topped with a heart or an abstract swirl or some other bullshit no-one wants. Sure it’s impressive, but it isn't exciting. It's impressive in the same way that civil engineering or internet banking are impressive – you’d probably make a mess of it if you tried to do it yourself, but you rarely feel like applauding it.

That is where Kazuki Yamamoto comes in. Yamamoto’s latte art, which he produces in his cafe in the Japanese city of Osaka, is the mindblowing kind of impressive, the sort that leads to whiplash-inducing double-takes and stunned silence. It is literally incredible, in that you may not believe that this is a thing. Trust us, it is. 

To give you an idea of what we’re dealing with here (if the pictures hadn’t already given you a clue), just watch this video. It's the first that comes up on a Youtube search for Kazuki’s name, a five minute opus in which the barista begins with two cups of coffee. He pours a little foamed milk into one and begins to craft out some shapes, drawing a fish in the foam using what appears to be a prison shiv. It’s all very intricate and impressive, and looks not too dissimilar to painting. After a few intricate details are added, he starts to add some apparently random blobs of foam around the edge of the cup. Before you know it, a three-dimensional cat made entirely of frothed milk is jumping out of the second cup and into the first. It’s surreal, it’s nonsensical, and it’s brilliant, not least for the knowledge that someone then had to try to drink around a cat.

Yamamoto has built up an incredible library of coffee-based reproductions of anime stars, your favourite characters from film and TV, and a full menagerie of milk-made animals on his Twitter account and blog. He's pulled in hundreds of thousands of fans with his work, and regularly makes appearances at events across Asia where you too can stand in line and ask him to put whatever you come up with onto a cappucino.

His coffee art reflects a Japanese culture packed with iconic characters and imbued with a love of needless cuteness and nonsensical complexity (tendencies displayed by the robots which patrol the country's shopping centres, beaming out information and offering up unflinching and faintly terrifying smiles). We got in touch with the man himself, and with the help of some garbled Google translations we discovered one more key thing – he likes to mix things up. Yamamoto told us that it’s more fun to make a new piece of art in a new style than it is to just do the same thing over and over, and that’s an argument we can get on board with.

After all, a tulip or a fern says very little about the barista behind the pour, other than they might be taking their coffee a little bit too seriously. And if there's one thing we can't stand at Phagomania, it's people taking things seriously. From now on, no more ferns on our coffee – unless it's part of a 'Between Two Ferns...'-based latte art request featuing a giant Zach Galfianakis made of warm milk.

Follow Kazuki on Twitter at @george_10g http://ameblo.jp/cafe-10g/