Before every trip to Tokyo I usually go through the Tabelog rankings from top to bottom, and this time there was an Akasaka cake shop I’d never seen before, so I pushed myself to go. It was enough to make me wonder whether I really needed to push that hard. Three cake shops back to back… and after eating all that I still had to go out for dinner..
The storefront
It’s called Akasaka, but it’s really near Tameike-Sanno Station. Right next to the Prime Minister’s Office, you could say. The Austrian Embassy is also around here, which is probably why an Austrian pastry shop opened here. The name is really hard, so it took me a while to memorize it.
Sachertorte
In the end I couldn’t eat in the shop and only did takeout. Sachertorte makes me think of Demel, and this one is also a straightforwardly rich cake. It’s about on par with Demel. The flavor is so intense that eating a lot of it is a bit much; I think buying one and splitting it among three people would be about right.
Trockenbeerenauslese
A Trockenbeerenauslese for just 2,500 yen a bottle caught my eye, and I bought one thinking, what a surprise. In full-bottle terms that works out to around 8,000 yen. To be fair, cheaper TBA isn’t unheard of (whether you should even call that stuff TBA is another question), but I bought it mostly out of curiosity, and after drinking it I’d say it’s well worth the price. Good buy.
They also had all sorts of other sweets. Dragées and so on.. Everything on the menu is high level, so if I have the time I’d love to go back and sweep up a whole haul.