Mr. Sato’s determination pays off in treat for the eyes and taste buds.
Recently, our ace reporter Mr. Sato told us that he needed to go to Toranomon Hills, a shopping and entertainment complex in downtown Tokyo’s Toranomon neighborhood. Why? To eat ice cream.
As Mr. Sato explained, recently he’s been seeing photo after photo of the soft serve ice cream from Dolce Tacubo, a dessert cafe located in Toranomon Hills, that’s been going viral. “Once the algorithm decides ‘You like this kind of stuff, don’t you?’ and starts filling your social feeds with it, you end up wanting to try it more and more, right?” he told us while heading out the door.
Honestly, we’ve never known Mr. Sato to need any prodding by outside forces to convince him to eat ice cream, but we trust his savvy sense when it comes to photogenic sweets, and we anxiously awaited his report…which almost didn’t come in.
Like a lot of Japanese shopping centers, Toranomon Hills has a food section, called T-Market, in its basement area. Mr. Sato assumed that’s where he’d find Dolce Tacubo, but after making multiple laps of the place, he still couldn’t find the cafe.
So next he took the elevator up to the higher levels of the building, but he still couldn’t find it. Even consulting Google Maps didn’t clear things up, since the app told him to exit the building entirely, then come back in through another entrance, which didn’t make any logical sense to him. Eventually, it was human intelligence that put him on the right path, as Mr. Sato asked the Toranomon Hills employee posted at the taxi stand where he could find Dolce Tacubo, and they informed him that the cafe really is the T-Market zone, on basement level 2, so back down the escalator our reporter went.
At the risk of offending the sensibilities of interior designers with a penchant for minimalism, T-Market’s aesthetics might be a little too elegant for their own good. A number of the understated storefronts don’t have the shop’s name prominently displayed above their entrances, which is how Mr. Sato managed to walk right past this place multiple times…
…before he finally realized this actually is Dolce Tacubo!
He’d been almost ready to give up and go home before he spotted the surprisingly unassuming sign for Dolce Tacubo’s soft serve, but now that he knew he was in the right place, it was time to try the viral-hit dessert for himself. The ice cream is available in three varieties, vanilla, kabocha/Japanese pumpkin, and “mixed,” which gives you both flavors together. The vanilla is 1,000 yen (US$6.30) and the kabocha 1,200, which are premium prices for ice cream in Japan, and it’s a little weird that the mixed cone is 1,300 yen, more expensive than an all-kabocha cone despite half of it being the less-expensive vanilla ice cream.
But hey, desserts aren’t always logical, so Mr. Sato decided to splurge on a mixed cone, and waited in the café’s eat-in space while the staff prepared his treat.
It was every bit as beautiful as he’d hoped it would be. Amazingly, the swirly ridges of vanilla and kabocha wound through and wrapped around each other without any smearing save for a small section at the very top.
The roasted pumpkin seeds are a classy touch too, and there’s so much care put into the presentation that it almost feels like personal pampering, putting a big smile on Mr. Sato’s face.
Dolce Tacubo’s soft serve is more than just a proverbial pretty face, too. Both of the types of ice cream are rich and flavorful. If you’ve never had kabocha sweets before, they tend to be both lighter and sweeter than what you’d get with Western-style pumpkin pie, and this is an outstanding example of how well it can work as an ice cream flavor. In terms of texture Dolce Tacubo’s soft serve is actually on the firmer end of the spectrum within the category, dense enough that you can easily stand a spoon in it when it’s just-served. It melts easily on the palate, though, and has a silky mouthfeel without any significant grittiness.
Mr. Sato can’t finish his taste-testing notes without mentioning the waffle cone too. It’s got a nice, substantial weight to it and a stimulating crunchiness that makes for some great synergy with the smooth ice cream.
Beautiful, delicious, and interesting, Dolce Tacubo’s soft serve is a high-quality dessert by any metric, and Mr. Sato feels it definitely justifies not only its cost, but also the determination it might take to find it.
Shop information
Dolce Tacubo Caffe / ドルチェタクボカフェ
Address: Tokyo-to, Minato-ku, Toranomon 2-6-3, Toranomon Hills Station Tower basement level 2
東京都港区虎ノ門二丁目6番3号虎ノ門ヒルズ ステーションタワー 地下2階
Open 11 a.m.-8 p.m.
Website
Photos ©SoraNews24
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