Right before heading home at the end of a business trip to Tokyo, I dropped by, with some friends, a place I’d been dying to visit! It’s the café run by a bakery called VIRON in Shibuya, which serves lunch and then runs as a café after 2 p.m. I remember posting about VIRON a few times before. Of all the bakeries I’ve been to, it makes the best bread. I’d known about the café for ages, but my trips are always short and there’s always a long queue, so I only just got to go. We still had to wait this time, but I made a point of setting aside the time. We originally wanted the lunch course, but nobody’s schedule worked out, so we went during café time after 2 p.m.
A glass of water
Yes… a shot to test the white balance. The interior is calm and reminds me of a tiny bistro. It’s packed and the seating isn’t very roomy, but this pub-like atmosphere isn’t bad at all. It’s just a shame they make people queue so much. Then again, we did come on a weekend
200-gram steak with French fries
Prices here are very reasonable across the board. The steak seemed to be Australian beef, but there was nothing lacking in either the portion or the doneness. The menu is wide too, which makes it great for a group to order a bit of everything. That’s exactly how we used it that day.
Hinai-jidori chicken sausage with lentil salad
The chicken sausage was surprisingly good, but the texture of the lentils was unusual. Most bistro food is this kind of thing, isn’t it? It works with rice, and it works as a drinking snack… I guess izakaya culture is indispensable anywhere in the world.
Olives and cornichons
It’s bread, but with olives in it, so it looked like a good match for wine.
Baguette
This was under 300 yen, and honestly the baguette is so good you’d be perfectly happy ordering just this one. A true baguette, crusty outside and soft inside. Ordinary baguettes are hard both outside and in -_- But partly to level up my experience, I tried a few more things.
Coppa and cheese salad
It was the salad of the day, so I ordered it. As you’d expect from a French bistro, they seem to have put some care into the dressing, but it was just ordinary.
A glass of Rhône wine
I thought a spicy Rhône would go well with this kind of food, so I ordered one. They had Burgundy too… but the food wasn’t all that delicate.
A traditional dish from Brittany: a buckwheat crêpe
An unusual dish, a bit like egg bread, I’d say. Maybe it was the unusual buckwheat flour, but it tasted good; I’d already eaten way too many carbs, though…
Bread we bought downstairs
It had chocolate in it, so it was a bit sweet. Nice as a dessert. I thought we’d never finish everything we bought, but in the end we ate it all.
Toast…
Why did I buy this again… Anyway, it went down nicely too, yum… We ate until we were stuffed and it came to about 2,500 yen per person, so it’s great value for money. If you want a cheap full course around here, a place called Concombre would be the better choice, but for a light meal I recommend this place too.
I felt it again this time: every bread item here is satisfying. I think it’s because VIRON was originally a flour company, so they use good flour. Whenever I leave a place this happy, I always buy a souvenir, and this time I bought a whole sack of flour -_-, heavy as it was. I’m really curious what kind of bread it will make. For a while, though, I’ll just have to imagine how it tastes.