Dinner was great, so as always we headed off to a dessert place. ^_^ I’d heard there was a café famous for its cakes near Nishiki Market, the so-called “Kitchen of Kyoto,” so we walked there to help digest. I’ve been to Nishiki Market in central Kyoto plenty of times, and honestly, unless it’s your first time in Japan, there isn’t that much to see. It’s not cheap either… So I’d hoped to skip it if I could, but here I was again.
When we got there the place was packed. We waited in the waiting area, then picked our cakes and sat down.
My pick: the nut cake + sparkling water set
Somehow it feels luxurious. It has a date-spot vibe. Maybe that’s why it’s couples everywhere you look.
Close-up of the cake
It’s a cake packed with nuts and laced with rum. I’ve been to a place with a similar concept before, and when you put a strongly aromatic liquor in a cake, it lifts both the flavor and the aroma at the same time and makes up for its weak spots, like heaviness. This cake is really well made too. Personally, though, I think it wouldn’t have hurt to put in even more nuts. I’m a total nut fiend, you see..
My friend’s pudding and cherry pie + iced coffee set
Close-up of the cake and pudding
This place is definitely very good compared to your average shop, but it still falls short of the desserts we had yesterday at Grand Maison Graciani. That’s the problem with becoming a dessert maniac. Ordinary shops stop satisfying you, and you end up drifting from one restaurant to the next that’s big enough to hire a skilled pâtissier… -_-;; Putting the cart before the horse, you might say.. It’s a sad thing..
Close-up of the sparkling water
The bottle chiller is wonderfully old-fashioned. Nice concept. Which is probably why business is so good..
And this is the water pitcher
I didn’t manage to photograph the rest of the menu, but the chocolate menu looked great too (it might actually be their main thing), and there’s a wide range of other items. There were also lots of cakes with liquor in them. It’s a small shop, but maybe because the atmosphere and the taste are both good – and the prices are reasonable too – it’s easy to see why it’s so popular. If you happen to pass by this area, I recommend dropping in. That said, a guy on his own or two guys together might be better off skipping it. It’s that much of a couples’ paradise. At the table right next to us, it wasn’t just the woman: the guy was feeding her cake with a spoon too. My friend and I watched this, fuming, and gulped down glass after glass of cold water.. This too is the tragedy of the dessert maniac.. Ahem..