After a truly terrible lunch that I won’t link to because I want to forget it happened and wouldn’t like any of you to repeat my mistakes, Mayu and I walked around Kagurazaka. It’s a mellow neighborhood – apart from the homey, shitamachi feel; abundant french bistros; and high-end antiques and art shops, you can find odd things like these huge copper doors covered with Egyptian hieroglyphs. Mmmm hmmmmm.
Did you like the use of semi-colons there?
If you walk long enough, you’ll find this very clean and bright Japanese sweets shop, Seikanin. Do be careful though – I have a feeling this guy is going to miss it altogether, so don’t let that happen to you.
They don’t have any eat-in facilities, but there’s a gravelly little park around the corner where you could go to eat. (If you were Mayu and me, accidentally dressed similarly, you might well look like an interracial gay couple hanging out creepily in a park where moms take their kids to play. Don’t let that happen to you either.) What they do have is wagashi that are a cut above average. I tried a tiny jelly-filled yuzu (hollowed, boiled in sugar, refilled with yuzu jelly) and a beans-and-chestnuts concoction that had been wrapped to look a like a fig (second from left in the top picture).
They have cakes and cookies and gift boxes and stuff too. I’m just saying, it’s here and there are some really pretty ones. If you got excited, you could easily buy too much and stuff yourself. Don’t let that happen to you.