More cafe adventures in Japan, this time round in Tokyo! After exploring Shibuya and patronising Muji for the umpteenth time, we made our way to attic room to escape the drizzle outside. Coffee is decent-ish but they have no English menus available, which proved to be a problem. I wanted to order dessert, but from my garbled conversation with the waiter, I inferred that they only serve main courses and drinks? Then again, I MAY be wrong. Something might have been lost in translation along the way. Perhaps you'll have better luck if you speak the language or are better at sign language than I am, LOL.



Having had my coffee fix earlier on at attic room, I settled for a chai latte when we navigated our way to this next cafe. Similar to Cafe Bibliotic Hello! which I wrote about in my Kyoto Cafe Adventures, this was one of the bigger cafes we had a chance to visit whilst in Japan. Hooray for English menus, I finally managed to satisfy my sweet tooth with a slice of banana walnut cake! It was still pouring when we were at Streamer Coffee Company, and I noticed staff members bringing out umbrellas for their customers to borrow. I was impressed by the amount of trust the employees have with their customers, to have enough faith that these customers will have the basic courtesy to come back on another day to return the umbrellas. I'm not sure if I'll ever witness the same act in a Singapore cafe #justsaying



Third cafe joint I visited in Tokyo - as I'm churning out this entry, I realised how uninspired I am to continue writing. Maybe it's because I had just about the same coffee order at most of the cafes. Their cafe-culture is a tad different from ours. They don't often serve food and to be frank, most Singaporeans won't fly all the way to Japan to eat at their cafes. We rather drink the coffee, then head on over to somewhere else and grab a bowl of ramen or chirashi-don.

Hence, it's getting a tad monotonous to constantly keep saying that the coffee is "pretty decent" at all the different joints. Because I've said this many times before, I'm no coffee connoisseur. As long as the roast isn't overly charred or acidic, I'm fine with it. So yeah, maybe just let the photos do the talking for this outlet. In case you can't really tell, it's super tiny and serves as more of a takeaway kiosk in my opinion.



This last place received rave reviews online and was highly recommended by a couple of friends. There was even a long queue when we went to visit. However, I feel that it is ridiculously over-rated. If you MUST give this place a try, order ONLY their hot coffee. The iced options taste very mediocre and is totally not worth waiting in line for. The baked custard, which I ordered just to try, isn't good as well. Overall, I was highly disappointed with the place - partly because my expectations were somewhat built up and partly because the coffee, in my amateur opinion, was average.

I guess that wraps up my Japan Cafe Adventures entries. I'm still figuring out how I want to categorise the remainder of my posts. Hopefully I'll have some spare time in the next two weeks to finish them off before I start work full time. My days of bumming are numbered, sighs*

Labels: food, grad trip, japan, tokyo, travel

written at 21:45