Lately I have been making the rounds of the famous cake shops in Tokyo. The goal is to find another shop on the level of Au Bon Vieux Temps, Mont St. Clair or A Tes Souhaits!, but the highly rated shops are all in such out-of-the-way places that it is not going to be done in a day or two.
Aigre-Douce
It is quite a walk from Mejiro Station. Starting with the name, it felt a lot like Hôtel Douce.
Inside
Like Hôtel Douce, they sell a huge variety of cakes. I really agonised over what to have.
Sarabande
A moist sponge cake soaked with a rich apple flavour. Clearly a shop with real skill.
Girotte
The outside is a chocolate mousse with cassis, and inside there is cassis jam. The biscuit in the cake was tasty too.
Coffee
A dessert shop with reasonable prices and excellent flavours. If there is a downside, it is that there are so many cakes and desserts that choosing is hard. Still, compared with Tokyo’s very top cake shops like Au Bon Vieux Temps, it does fall a little short. Not somewhere I would make a special trip from far away for.
Kaori Hirone
This is a cake shop closer to the station than Aigre-Douce. It is small, luxurious and very expensive, the complete opposite concept to Aigre-Douce. Even with two cake shops in the same neighbourhood, the clientele is so different that they probably do not affect each other’s sales at all. And I do not know whether she was staff or the owner, but the woman working in the shop was so model-level beautiful that it startled me (she was a little older though..). I cannot remember the last time I saw a beauty in the dessert world..
Gohobi chestnut shortcake
It is tiny, yet I think it cost around 800 yen. The strawberry shortcake was a similar concept, and that is Tokyo’s top-tier price level. They make everyday cakes with generous amounts of good ingredients. A concept that Japan’s ladies of leisure would love. It tastes good and looks pretty, but my taste runs to the more complex and subtle flavours of somewhere like Mont St. Clair, so I doubt I will be back any time soon.
Tanakaya
Having come all the way to Mejiro, I could not just go home, so I dropped in at Tanakaya, the single malt whisky specialist. A wonderful place.
A whisky caught my eye
It was a limited release that is hard to find these days, so I bought a bottle. I wonder what it will taste like.