Angela Erika Kubo - The Japan Times

LIFE / Food & Drink / KONBINI WATCH

Jul 1, 2014

Refreshing summer drink repackaged as a chocolate

One of the best beverages to combat this sticky weather is Kirin Sekai no Kitchen's Salty Lychee drink, which is purported to replenish the minerals and fluids sweat out in Japan's horribly humid summers. And now, in partnership with Glico, Kirin has released a chocolate version (¥138), available in convenience stores. The sweet scent of lychee may be overpowering as you unwrap the packaging, but the flavors of the fruit are subtle and sublime within the white chocolate. No promises about cooling off, mind you.

LIFE / Food & Drink

Jun 26, 2014

Beer garden season begins with a hearty 'kanpai'

When the first Biergarten (beer gardens) started popping up in Germany's Bavarian region in the late 19th century, who would've thought that they would one day come to represent summer in Japan. Well, I guess it's not that unbelievable.

LIFE / Food & Drink / DESSERT WATCH

Jun 24, 2014

Cupcakes and other treats make Magnolia Bakery worth lining up for

The newly opened Omotesando branch of New York's Magnolia Bakery sells fresh cupcakes topped with a generous dollop of sweet buttercream frosting — a welcome reward after the long, long lines. The mini key lime cheesecake (¥880), baked with a graham cracker crust, and the chain's popular banana pudding (¥680 for 10 oz [285 g] and ¥880 for 13 oz [370 g]) are worth a try too. "What our employees don't know is that they'll end up gaining 10 pounds," jokes owner Steven Abrams. (B1F Gyre, 5-10-1 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo; 03-6450-5800; www.magnoliabakery.com.)/p>

LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO BAR ADVENTURE

Jun 17, 2014

Hack your way into a computerized cocktail

While some bars have live music to bring in customers, newly opened Hackers Bar in Tokyo's Roppongi district holds live computer coding events to bring in the programmers.

LIFE / Food & Drink / KONBINI WATCH

Jun 17, 2014

Red Bull cheers on Japan's Samurai Blue

While it may be coincidental that a limited number of Red Bull's The Blue Edition (¥206) drinks were out in convenience stores just as the World Cup kicked off last week, you can feel as if you're showing your colors and supporting Samurai Blue as you gulp down this blueberry-flavored energy drink. While there's no guarantee that Red Bull will give the Japanese team the wings needed to win the tournament, it'll definitely give you enough energy to stay up all night (or wake up early) to cheer them on in their matches. Assuming they still have more than a couple left, that is.

LIFE / Food & Drink / DESSERT WATCH

Jun 10, 2014

A chocolate ice cream dessert you may never forget

Eating Avalanche (¥1,350) at the Marunouchi Ozao branch of Belgian patisserie Debailleul is like falling in love. You can't get the treat off your mind and the silly grin off your face. As bitter hot chocolate is poured onto it, the spherical chocolate shell melts and crumbles away like an avalanche, which explains the name of the dessert. Inside you'll find bits of white cookie dough and vanilla ice cream. Warning: This dessert may induce the most powerful foodgasm of your life. (1F Marunouchi Oazo, 1-6-4 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; 03-5224-3565; www.debailleul.jp).

LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO BAR ADVENTURE

Jun 3, 2014

Drinking with the dead at Tokyo's zombie bar

Once a month, Night Gallery Cafe Crow in Roppongi becomes a horror scene straight out of a George A. Romero film, as zombies descend upon the small venue. For more than two years, zombie performance unit Zombiena has been renting out the place every last Sunday from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. to hold what it calls a Zombie Bar.

LIFE / Food & Drink / KONBINI WATCH

Jun 3, 2014

A delicious treat, if you can find it

In the seven months since its release, over 3.45 million F Style Mochi Ponyo treats have been sold in Three-F convenience stores, and they have become a trending topic of discussion on Twitter. Mochi Ponyo are custard-filled sweets wrapped in soft pastry made of rice flour. Expect to have a hard time finding one: They're so popular that fans snap them up as soon as they're restocked. In addition to the standard custard flavor (¥108), you can try matcha (powdered green tea ¥126) or limited-edition strawberry (¥120).

CULTURE

May 31, 2014

Essential summer festivals 2014

A summer without festivals simply wouldn’t be a proper summer in Japan, so now that the humidity has returned, it’s time to slop on an extra layer of sunscreen and line up some outdoor activities.

LIFE / Food & Drink / DESSERT WATCH

May 27, 2014

Colombin's matcha-flavored sweets

Colombin, which was founded in 1924 and boasts of being the first provider of authentic French sweets in Japan, is putting a Japanese twist on traditional French goodies with the release of bright green, matcha-flavored sweets in select shops until June 26.

LIFE / Food & Drink / DESSERT WATCH

May 22, 2014

Animal cupcakes too cute to resist

One Fairycake Fair cupcake may be too small to satiate real hunger, but when it comes to the amount of frosting it'll have on it, you can count on it being generous. Fairycake Fair makes a series of cakes shaped like animals from the wild. For ¥460, you can get your hands on a panda one, which is topped with a large dollop of mascarpone cheese and vanilla cream with piped chocolate for eyes, nose and mouth. It tastes as good as it looks. Fairycake Fair; JR Higashi Nihon Tokyo Station B1, Marunouchi 1-9-1, Chiyoda-ku; 03-3211-0055; www.fairycake.jp.

LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO BAR ADVENTURE

May 20, 2014

Mitaka's 3 Stories is a birthplace of new tales

They say that when you enter a good bar you should bring with you an anecdote that you share with the bartender or another customer sitting at the bar, who, in turn, would also have a story to exchange. By the end of the night, after a bottle of whiskey to loosen the tongue and a few laughs, a new story is made right inside the bar. Hence the naming of 3 Stories.

LIFE / Food & Drink / KONBINI WATCH

May 20, 2014

Vegetable ice cream — not as awful as it sounds

Frozen vegetables usually bring to mind prepackaged frozen chunks of carrot and broccoli meant to be heated up and served with chicken or steak. Haagen-Dazs, though, proved that image wrong with the release of carrot- and tomato-flavored ice creams (¥284) last week. Cherry and orange flavors mask the vegetable taste, so you don't feel like you're eating frozen tomato soup. Even moms may be able to convince their veggie-hating kids to eat it, though I wouldn't group it with the vegetables on the food pyramid.

LIFE / Food & Drink

May 13, 2014

You don't have to visit France to get buttered up

In most Japanese supermarkets, sweet cream butter, or muhakkō batā dominates the shelves, but in recent years cultured butter, hakkō batā — a type of butter common in continental Europe — can be found in upscale supermarkets such as Seijo Ishii, due to the popularity of Echire butter, a French butter considered the best in the world. The smoothness of the butter makes it a popular choice for patissiers.

LIFE / Food & Drink

May 1, 2014

A golden time to dine outdoors

Now is the golden season in Tokyo: balmy days, mellow temperatures, low humidity and no mosquitoes. There's nothing better than a nice, leisurely (and maybe even boozy) lunch outside — dinner, too, as long as you bring a warm jacket or throw.

LIFE / Food & Drink

May 1, 2014

Will Tokyo go nuts for frozen yogurt?

Frozen yogurt is taking off in Tokyo as a healthy alternative to ice cream in an effort to beat the heat. Made from milk instead of cream, frozen yogurt packs far less fat and more nutrients. Woodberry's uses freshly homemade fermented yogurt and fruits straigh from the farm. A limited-edition passion fruit flavor — shipped from Fukuoka — is available until May 7. There are other flavors to choose from made with local or organic produce such as avocado, yuzu and Ehime Prefecture lemons.

LIFE / Food & Drink

Apr 29, 2014

The bread that thinks its a pancake

AntenDo bakeries throughout Tokyo are now selling what the company calls Hotcake Pan (¥210) — sweet bread in a baking cup filled with vanilla-bean custard and topped with a thick square of butter. The bread comes with a plastic drop filled with pure Canadian maple syrup. Heat the bread in the microwave for 30 seconds or in a toaster oven for a minute or two, and then pour the maple syrup on top — or better yet, shoot it inside. The end result tastes just like a pancake, and is available only in April. www.antendo.com.

LIFE / Food & Drink / DESSERT WATCH

Apr 22, 2014

Get in line for Japan's latest Cronut homage

Tokyo may not have a branch of Dominique Ansel, but it does have a Japanese answer to the New York bakery's famous Cronut. The next time you're waiting for a friend in front of Shinjuku's Alta building, grab the titular snack of Croissant Taiyaki (¥210), comprising sweet bean filling wrapped with a buttery pastry crust. You'd better hope your friend arrives late, though — on weekends the line can stretch into the adjacent Shinjuku Station subway entrance and all the way down the stairs. 3-24-3 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo; also at Gin no An and Tsukiji Gindaco stores around Japan.

LIFE / Food & Drink / KONBINI WATCH

Apr 15, 2014

M&M's get fruity with new Raspberry flavor

A new flavor of one of America's best-selling candies has just hit Japanese convenience stores. You can now pop white, light pink and dark pink raspberry-flavored M&M's (¥100) into your mouth. The candies are cute, but might be a bit too sweet and artificial-tasting for those who prefer something subtler. Unlike other candies that come and go, these raspberry M&M's will be around for a while — Mars Japan says that it will keep them on shelves for at least a year.

LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO BAR ADVENTURE

Apr 15, 2014

A boozy round of beer pong hits the spot

Long associated with college frat parties, beer pong is now mainstream in the United States. Although the game — which requires a long table, a pair of ping pong balls and several plastic cups, each filled with an inch of beer — is difficult to talk a Japanese pub owner into replicating, there are several groups in the city that hold beer pong games for newcomers and those bored with simply drinking beer out of a mug.

author

Meta

Podcast

Longform

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS

SUPPLEMENTS BINDER

In your social network

In your inbox

In your social network

In your inbox