Emme

⭐⭐⭐

🍨 Dessert / 📍 Omotesando

📓 Visits: 2 (2023)

Who's the best pastry chef in Japan?  Natsuko Shoji won Asia's Best Pastry Chef in 2020, an achievement even more incredible when you consider she only makes one dessert.  Gault & Millau is a much more serious publication.  In 2023 they named Emme's Miya Emmeiji as Japan's Best Pastry Chef.

It's a strange restaurant.  The room was cold and deliveries are taken in front of guests.  With a sofa, four tables and a counter it looks more like a bar than a restaurant and indeed after 5pm it's a wine bar that also serves course dinner menus.  From 12-3:30 it's a dessert bar with a few lunch options.

There are around six kinds of dessert to choose from on a laminated menu.  These will include a seasonal vacherin and a seasonal parfait.  You can preview the menu on their Website.  Unfortunately it's in Japanese only there but they have an English paper menu when you visit.

On visit #1 my choice of "chocolate royale" was unfortunately not available so I went for the hassaku and Vanuatu chocolate soufflé parfait with anise scented milk sorbet.  The ice-cream was grainy (well, in fairness they said 'sorbet' but wouldn't a silky smooth milk ice-cream be better?) and the dessert all went into a kind of mush as you ate it.  It took me a while to order this once I was told my first choice was off because chocolate and fruit doesn't work for me but nothing else on the menu really appealed to me that day either.

On visit #2 I chose the chestnut souffle with porcini ice-cream.  I was told it would take 20 minutes but it took exactly 30.  The dessert consisted of chestnut souffle, fresh pear, pear soup, shaved chestnut, blackcurrant, shiso flowers and porcini ice-cream.

I saw the souffle come out of the oven 10 minutes before it was served.  It had completely lost the impact you get from a hot out of oven souffle and might just as well have been a sponge cake, which might have been preferable as it would have taken 20 minutes less.  The ice-cream had a large ice crystal and there were maybe 2-3 small mouthfuls.  As on my first visit the dessert was fundamentally flawed.  Desserts should have a maximum of one or two dominant flavours with anything else there to enhance those flavours and/or add texture.  Here there are too many dominant flavours on the plate and there are major flaws in the execution.

You're not required to order a drink but you might be bored while waiting if you don't.  Cafe au lait was not properly hot on visit #1.

It's very casual.  Staff are nice but a bit green.  One of the staff could speak good English on visit #2.  Emmeiji-san wasn't present on visit #1.  On visit #2 she came in late but all the cooking and serving is done by other staff.

If you had one of these desserts at the end of a bistro meal in a place that doesn't purport to specialise in desserts you might be quite happy.  But let's go back to how we got here.  This is supposed to be the best pastry chef in Japan.  Do me a favour.  If that was really true, why would the restaurant be empty?

So who do I think is the best pastry chef in Japan?  Well I haven't had consistently better desserts other than from Natsuko Takahashi at Naoto.K.

📌 https://tabelog.com/tokyo/A1303/A130301/13238947/

❓ My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ 3.0

📱 Booking: 🟩 You can book online via their Website (in Japanese only) but on both my weekday visits I just walked in and there were plenty of seats free.

📍 Location:

2-3-19 Shibuya.  7 mins from Omotesando Exit B1 (flat) or 8 mins from Shibuya Station (uphill).  Up the outside staircase.  Opposite the side entrance to Aoyama Gakuin.
Map data ©2023 Google

📅 Visit December 2023

Dessert 2,200
Champagne 1,760

💴 Damage: 4,070
⏱️ Time taken: 40m

📅 Visit March 2023

Dessert 2,420
Cafe au lait 440

💴 Damage: 2,860
⏱️ Time taken: 35m