Harajuku Crêpes

Kon'nichiwa, just a quick one from me today. What with job interviews and all the rest of it my day is rapidly running out of time to cram everything into it! It’s been 3 weeks since I managed any novel writing because all my spare writing time has been eaten up by trying to catch up with my blogs! But anyway, just a short one today about the culinary delights of Harajuku.

This fun part of Tokyo (which I visited when I was first in Japan) is bursting full of tourist shops and the like, and is often crammed full of people, locals and foreigners alike, all dressed up in crazy outfits. You see people walking around like they’ve just stepped out of a manga magazine, and others who look like they’re on their way to a Cosplay convention. Something we noticed on our last visit – Harajuku is famous for its crêpes, and if you go the main shopping street you’ll see several little crêpe shops with winding queues punctuating the already clogged artery that is Takeshita street.

Japan's longest-running crêpe shop is the Marion Crêpes, which started out as a food truck in 1976 before moving to Takeshita-dori. However, the queue for that one was humongous so we opted for a smaller stand, with just as many flavours to pick. There must have been about a hundred options to choose from. You could have crêpes with cream, ice-cream, custard, fruit, sauce, cake… and any combination of the above. There were savoury crêpes like pizzas that were stuffed with tuna, and simple crêpes with just lemon and sugar. Most of the crêpes had at least three different fillings in, with equally long names: the blueberry special, banana chocolate double ice-cream, banana café au lait whipped cream and berry berry brownie cake special. Some had slices of cakes and puddings inside, and others had cream piled so high on top that they looked like ice-creams. In glass cabinets outside the shop were plastic replicas to help you get an idea of what your crêpe would look like, though of course the replicas were much more garishly coloured and abundantly filled than the ones in real life.

I opted for strawberry-and-cheesecake crème brûlée cream crêpe (try saying that after you’ve had a few drinks!) and Sasha had something similar but with tiramisu instead of cheesecake. Basically, mine had a slice of cheesecake squished down the middle, squirty cream pumped into every available space around it, strawberry slices and strawberry sauce smothered in the next layer, with a caramelized crème brûlée hat on top. Phew! Yeah, it was quite a mouthful, and like all ‘tourist snacks’, a little bit disappointing. The crêpe itself was fine, just an ordinary thin crêpe really. No complaints about the strawberry element, and the hardened crème brûlée top was nice and crunchy. Most disappointing was the ‘cheese cake’ which was certainly not cheese cake at all, but just a piece of sponge cake. The cream was certainly abundant, but perhaps too abundant. Unsurprisingly, I felt a bit sick after consuming the monstrosity.

I probably won’t go to Harajuku again – the crowds are a bit much, and while there are some good shops to get deals in, it’s all a bit too mad for me. The crêpe was interesting, but I’d rather spend 100 Yen on treat from Mister Donut than 500 Yen on something that is 80% cream. Though it appears these ‘Harajuku Crêpes’ are really rather popular – there are branches all over America, which might explain all the American tourists that were also standing in line for their pancake sugar-rush.
That’s all from me today, sayonara!