Japan’s luxury bread loaf boom was supposed to have died down, but apparently no one told this Ginza bakery.
A couple of years ago, premium-priced loaves of bread were all the rage among foodies in Japan. Luxury bakeries sprang up one after another, with long lines of customers waiting to get in and drop 1,000 yen (US$6;30) or so on a single loaf, several times more than what you’d pay for the same quantity at a supermarket.
As is often the case, though, after a while the fad faded, and pricy bakeries began to gradually disappear and be replaced by new tenants chasing the next foodie trend. One of the survivors of the luxury bread loaf glory days, though, is Ginza Nishikawa.
▼ Ginza Nishikawa’s flagship branch in Ginza
With half of its name coming from Tokyo’s fashionable and wealthy Ginza neighborhood, you’d be correct in assuming that the bakery chain hasn’t abandoned its high-quality, high-cost philosophy regarding its baked goods. While many other purveyors of 1,000-yen loaves of bread have had to fold up shop, Ginza Nishikawa has recently begun offering a bread loaf set, which it calls Shigoku (“The Supreme”), with an eye-watering price of 10,000 yen (US$63)!
This quickly caught the attention of our Japanese-language reporter P.K. Sanjun. However, while P.K. and his stomach were in agreement that he should definitely try the Shigoku for himself, his wallet had a firmly dissenting opinion on the matter. Luckily for P.K., this deadlock was resolved, or rather rendered irrelevant, when he was able to snag an invitation to a tasting event for the 10,000-yen set held at Ginza Nishikawa’s Ginza branch, which is the exclusive location offering the Shigoku.
Upon arrival, P.K. learned that the Shigoku is a set of two loaves of bread, meaning that they’re essentially 5,000 yen each. This still makes them the most expensive loaves of bread that he’s ever tasted, though.
Why are they so expensive? Because of the ingredients Ginza Nishikawa uses. The first of the two loaves is the Kumamoto Yamaeguri Bread, made with chestnuts from Kumamoto Prefecture, and the other is a loaf of Hand-churned Cultured Butter Croissant Bread.
P.K. tasted slices from each loaf both as-is and toasted. Starting with the Kumamoto chestnut loaf, P.K.’s initial reaction was that more so than bread, it feels like some kind of midway point between a loaf of bread and a poundcake, but closer to the latter.
This is, of course, not a complaint. There’s a very generous portion of chestnuts in every possible slice, and with whipped cream mixed into the batter before baking, the bread itself is rich, moist, and delicious.
The similarities with cake, though, make for kind of an unnatural sensation when eating the Kumamoto chestnut bread as toast, so P.K. recommends just slicing off a piece to eat without any extra cooking or crisping.
On the other hand, the hand-churned cultured butter loaf feels 100-percent like bread.
Sure, there’s a very smooth richness coming from the butter, which is produced by Yamanaka Dairy Farm in Hokkaido, Japan’s premiere prefecture for dairy products. But whereas the Kumamoto chestnut bread feels like a sweet snack or dessert, the hand-churned butter loaf still works best if used like normal bread, which means its toasts up very nicely too.
So in the end, is the supreme Shigoku set worth what Ginza Nishikawa is asks for it? It’s a tricky question to answer, since 10,000 yen is so far beyond the normal price point for bread that it messes with the sense of psychological scale to try to weight whether this, say, 20, 30, or 40 times more satisfying than a regular loaf of bread. On the other hand, if someone were going to spend 10,000 yen on bread, P.K. thinks this would be a fine, very tasty way to do so.
As you can probably imagine, Ginza Nishikawa doesn’t just bake up a bunch of Shigoku loaves every morning and set them out on the shelves in case someone wants to buy a set. Instead, you have to order the set ahead of time, with at least five days’ advance notice required. A total of 1,000 sets will be offered between October 20 and December 25, and reservations can be made online here.
Related: Ginza Nishikawa
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