Why you should experience Mr. Farmer in Tokyo, Japan.
Mr. Farmer is a verdant vegetable café where Jingumae's design-conscious character, produce-led cooking, plant-based creativity and West Coast inspiration converge through one of Omotesando's early health-focused dining concepts.
Set along the backstreets near Omotesando and just steps from Omotesando Hills, the café opens through a plant-filled interior and terrace that soften the surrounding fashion district with abundant greenery, pale surfaces and relaxed communal seating. Broad salads, burgers and colorful vegetable plates arrive with enough visual scale to turn produce into the focal point of the table, carrying the room's garden-like character directly into the food. Daylight, foliage and the open frontage give breakfast and lunch an easy indoor-outdoor rhythm that feels unusually removed from the dense retail streets surrounding it. The result is a Jingumae café whose physical freshness prepares the table for a project that has repeatedly expanded its definition of vegetable-centered dining.
What you should know about Mr. Farmer.
Mr. Farmer is best known for opening its first location in Omotesando on November 10, 2014 under restaurateur Akira Watanabe, who had already developed produce-focused restaurants including AWkitchen and Yasaiya Mei before creating a café devoted more completely to vegetables. Watanabe had also served as the first chef of Daikanyama restaurant Tableaux, adding a fine-dining chapter to the career that later earned him the “field evangelist” nickname attached to Mr. Farmer's launch. Eatwalk entered the opening with 30 producer-supporting restaurants across Japan and built Mr. Farmer around vegetables Watanabe selected from growers, initially organizing the food around substantial salads, open sandwiches, soups and the original vegetable drink called Nomu Salad. Research behind the concept had centered on the principle that beauty and health begin with food; strong demand for salads then pushed the young restaurant deeper into the health culture associated with America's West Coast and helped define the emerging brand. A major culinary shift arrived in March 2016 when the Omotesando kitchen introduced a broader program encompassing vegan and gluten-free cooking, cold-pressed juice and protein-conscious dishes. The original location underwent its largest reinvention on July 20, 2022, becoming an all-vegan café whose primary ingredients exclude animal products. In 2023, the restaurant joined Afroad Clinic and physician Shotaro Michishita on a preventive-health collaboration that brought medically developed dishes into the Omotesando menu, extending a 2014 vegetable-café premise into a project connecting food with preventive care.
Farmer's Cobb turns the café's current all-vegan direction into a substantial salad through mixed leaves, avocado, beetroot, tomato, olives and plant-derived versions of egg, ham, chicken and cheese bound with Cobb dressing. Spicy Mexican Taco develops the same plant-based approach through avocado, beans, barley, pickled red onion, coriander, mint and lime before jalapeño cheese and buffalo-ranch dressing bring chile heat and creaminess into the greens. Beet hummus and grilled summer vegetables shift the progression toward chickpea richness and charred zucchini, eggplant, pumpkin and young corn, with cumin, coriander, oregano and almond in the dukkah sharpening the roasted vegetables. Avocado and almond-milk spaghetti carries the kitchen beyond its salad foundation through a vegan pasta introduced in July 2026, broadening the same produce-centered approach through plant-derived creaminess. Mr. Farmer uses vegetables, grains, legumes, herbs and plant-based substitutes to sustain the abundance of its original café concept after the Omotesando kitchen's transition to fully vegan cooking.
How to fold Mr. Farmer into your trip.
Mr. Farmer works as the lunch anchor for an afternoon tracing private collecting, international museum architecture and postwar Japanese design through the cultural institutions surrounding Jingumae and Omotesando.
Begin at Ota Memorial Museum of Art, founded in 1980 after collector Seizo Ota's death made his private ukiyo-e holdings publicly accessible, with a collection now numbering about 15,000 works and spanning masters including Katsushika Hokusai. Continue to Watarium Art Museum, opened in September 1990 in a building by Swiss architect Mario Botta, whose first Japanese commission transformed a difficult triangular Jingumae plot into a compact contemporary-art institution. Conclude at Nezu Museum, founded in 1941 from businessman Kaichiro Nezu's private collection before Kengo Kuma redesigned the museum for its 2009 reopening, joining Asian art with a garden and tea-house complex near Omotesando. The progression moves from Ota's preservation of Edo-period printmaking through Botta's international museum architecture into Nezu's collection and Kuma's redesign, revealing the collecting and design culture surrounding Mr. Farmer.
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