tokyo food file

tea with Chez Pim: chotto zeitaku

Tea: Harrod's Assam (OG Fairtrade)

Milk: Shiro no Inochi (Shimane)

Bread: Viron levain pain de campagne (from the Marunouchi shop)

Butter: Yotsuba unsalted fermented (Hokkaido) 

Jams: from the wonderful Chez Pim…

At the front: the outstanding Tomato Raspberry — what a great combination, dry farmed tomatoes and sweet-tart red raspberries.

And on the slice behind: Bouquet des Fleurs marmalade, made with the rare aromatic oranges of that name. 

As the Japanese saying goes: ちょっと 贅沢 (chotto zeitaku). Literally, that translates as "a little luxurious". But really it means: "Go on, spoil yourself!"

excuse me, there's seaweed in this butter

As promised, more on the Normandie/Bretagne étape of the Joel Robuchon Tour de France Gourmand (now on at the Robuchon bakeries and stores in Tokyo/Yokohama)...

Alongside all the primo patisseries, they are selling a select line of foods from those two regions. Such as this range of canned sardines...

 There's also some great Camembert (as you'd expect). But what caught my eye was the artisan butter. It's called Brut de Baratte and it's made by Jean-Yves Bordier, a brilliant butter specialist in the ancient port city of Saint Malo (Brittany).

There are two varieties. The one that caught my eye was the one with the label that says "…aux algues" — with seaweed. This demanded to be tried.

Open the wrapper and you find the soft, light-yellow butter studded with flecks of red, black and dark green. It doesn't say what kind of seaweed it is, but I'm guessing the red one is dulse, and the green is a species of laver (nori) which has been cultivated off the coast of Brittany for a couple of decades now.

 

According to the Bordier web site, he developed this butter together with one of Robuchon's top chefs, Eric Lecerf. 

It doesn't taste of seaweed as such, but there is a wonderful light mineral-saltiness that goes beautifully with the smooth creaminess of the butter. Obviously you wouldn't want to slather strawberry jam all over it. But with a nice slice of good bread...

It's not hard to find good bread in Tokyo these days (the situation was very different a couple of decades ago). But leave it to Joel to make some of the very best.

This is one of our year-round favourites. It's simply called the miche (which I understand to be a traditional French term meaning simply a 'plump loaf').

Forget the baguettes and batards. This is the real French bread (as far as I'm concerned) — and as close as we in Tokyo are ever likely to get to a classic Poilane, the yardstick by which all bread (of whatever nationality) should be measured.

More about Bordier butter here on France Magazine... and on Movable Feast.

The photos at the top (of the sardines and butter on the shelf) were taken in the Boutique de Joel Robuchon in Marunouchi Brick Square. 

bespoke butter boutique: Echiré in Brick Square

With two dozen restaurants, bars and cafes over three floors, Marunouchi Brick Square was a hit right from its opening last September. But the biggest buzz and the longest lines have been at one of the smallest shops in the complex: Echiré Maison de Beurre, the first specialist butter boutique in the city.

 

 

Set up by France's best-known (internationally, at least) premium butter company, this little outlet has been drawing the kind of queues usually associated with high-end chocolatiers in the run-up to Valentine's Day.

 It's not the butter itself that is in such demand; it's the baked goods they produce each morning — especially the croissants.

 

 

There are three varieties, all baked a beautiful golden brown and a delicate, light-as-air texture. First to sell out are the "traditional" croissants, but it's the other two kinds that are truly exceptional. Containing 50-percent Echire butter (either salted or unsalted), they are so rich you could almost spread them on toast.

Despite a limit of six croissants per customer, they're usually all snapped up within 90 minutes of the shop opening. But we prefer to arrive around noon, after the crowds have gone, to pick up a bag of the fragrant madeleines and financiers. If there are any finer, fresher examples of these dainty two-bite cakes in the city, we haven't found them yet. 

The large tawny-coloured butter-rich shortbread known as broyé de poitou (or broyé potevin) is another of the treats on sale at the Echiré shop. It's a specialty of the Poitou-Charentes region of western France where the village of Echiré is located.

Echire Maison du Beurre, Marunouchi Brick Square 1F, 2-6-1 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku; (03) 6269-9840; www.echire-shop.jp Open daily 10 a.m.-8 p.m.