Tokyo's Elusive Cheesecake

Above, at the Imperial Hotel's Imperial Viking Sal restaurant in October 2015.

An article in Time Out Tokyo brought back memories.

Four years ago, I threw a small dinner party at the Imperial Viking Sal restaurant in Tokyo's Imperial Hotel (if the Imperial Hotel was good enough for Steve Martin in Godzilla in 1954, it was good enough for a dinner party). It was a buffet-style restaurant.

After dinner, I went over to the dessert table and found no cheesecake. When I mentioned this when I returned to our table, former Toho Pictures President Shogo Tomiyama got up and spoke to someone and managed to get me a slice of cheesecake. We've chuckled about that since.

After reading the Time Out Tokyo article, it seems that I was lucky to enjoy an apparently somewhat elusive item in Japan, at least one from a particular chef.

Time Out Tokyo begins with:

The city’s most popular gourmand hotspots are usually characterised by queues long enough to make you feel faint. People will wait for untold hours for a bowl of their favourite ramen or arrive at a store long before it opens to snatch a specialty item. Ironically, there are no queues for one of the city’s most sought-after cheesecakes – because it doesn’t have a physical store. 

Instead, the baked specialities at Mr. Cheesecake can only be purchased online two days a week (Sunday and Monday) and they sell out within minutes. In fact, it disappears so quickly that serious foodies who have tried to get their hands on the delicacy have dubbed it the ‘phantom cheesecake’. Should you be one of the lucky few to snag a cake, it will be delivered to you within five days – no, you can't choose the date and time of delivery. You can then eat it immediately or store it in the freezer for up to three months and save it for a special occasion. 

To read more, go here.