SWEETS PARADISE

Don’t tell your dentist.

Unless he gets a commission for every filling he performs, don’t do it. Here’s why.

Sweets Paradise is like every greedy, sweet-toothed kid’s dream come true. The premise (read: CHALLENGE) is simple: you pay ¥1,480, they give you 90 minutes to gorge yourself into a diabetic coma on, as the sign exclaims, Cake! Pasta! Sandwich! Drink!

The price is the same regardless of whether you choose to go in the daytime or at night. This is a distinct advantage over most other all-you-can-eat joints here that viciously ramp up the price at dinner time.

A quick note to visitors to Japan on a budget (or lovers of all-you-can-eat deals in general): here are the characters to look out for when scanning restaurant signage like the one above:

The characters 食べ放題 (tabehoudai) mean “all you can eat”.
Similarly, the characters 飲み放題 (nomihoudai) mean “all you can drink” (not found on the sign above).
The characters バイキング (baikingu) mean “Viking” and is a warped Japanese term that refers to a “buffet”. In the sign above, the largest characters in the middle read “Dessert Viking”. The Viking reference probably has its origins in the more appropriate Swedish word, “Smörgåsbord”.

There are 23 portals into the Paradise across the country, 9 of which can be found scattered around Tokyo. We stepped into one at Shibuya and were relieved to find it relatively uncrowded. We had tried the one at Kichijōji a week earlier, but left dismayed after being confronted with a crushing 3 hour wait to get in.

Needless to say, a trip to Sweets Paradise assumes that you’re already in the mood for a good internal sugar coating, but once you’re inside, the deliciously warm and inviting designer décor really kicks that urge up a few notches. At the Shibuya restaurant, the dominant reds and white make it seem like you’ve stepped into a big, fat strawberry and cream cake. Mmm.

There’s also some tasty looking lights on the wall. But you can’t eat them.

A quick scan of the restaurant locations on their website reveals that despite being a chain, they haven’t simply resorted to applying the same cookie-cutter look and feel to each restaurant. Each Sweets Paradise looks to have its own individually tailored ambience, and I for one tip my hat to the considerable effort that must have gone into each one. Seriously, check it out.

Buffet is the name of the game at Sweets Paradise. The “Healthy and Beauty Tea Bar” is a popular first port of call where patrons can suckle on an endless supply of soft drinks, boutique teas, coffee and hot chocolate (complete with marshmallows, of course).

Next in line is the ever-industrial looking soft-serve machine. Ever wondered what “sakura” (cherry blossom) flavoured soft-serve tastes like? No? Well, you can find out here if you ever change your mind.

The rice and pasta bar offers a selection of carbohydrated fuels such as fried rice, an assortment of spaghetti, Japanese curry, sandwiches and an odd French toast pudding to quickly energize one’s body in preparation for the sweet, sweet gorge to come. Your jaw isn’t going to power itself, you know. That, and despite being in a place that is inherently sweet-biased, you’re going to need something a bit savoury every now and then to balance out all the sweets you’ll be ingesting (your appetite will last longer).

Oh, and see that steel wall behind the counter? It’s actually a collection of sliding windows. Faceless chefs toil behind them and occasionally appear to swiftly replenish any of the buffet’s depleted pots, pans and dishes on the counter.

Here we have more drinks (juices, teas, Calpis water, etc.) and a limited selection of salads and dressing. But no one in their right mind goes to a place called Sweets Paradise for the greens, do they? Where are the SWEETS?!

Oh.

If you think I’m going to individually name everything on offer here at the cake and dessert bar, you can forget it. Keep in mind that I only had 90 minutes, and I wasn’t about to spend a third of that time taking notes. Nevertheless, I made a point to take these pictures after our time was up so you ought to get the idea regardless. There’s sponge cakes, cream rolls, pastries, cheesecakes, jellies, fruits salads, rice crackers, a big bucket of strawberry cream…

… and a much appreciated range of regional treats including perennial favourites such as sweet red bean paste, mochi and a variety of other Asian jellies and syrups that I don’t know the names of yet. And yes, that is a bowl of corn flakes in the middle. Don’t ask. Just eat it.

Nearby, a glorious dessert fondue spurts forth its eternal chocolatey spring. How mere mortals can resist thrusting their faces into such tantalisingly silken veils of sugar is beyond me.

Next to the fondue, some stone-roasted potatoes. In hindsight I wonder whether its positioning next to the fondue was deliberate…

Lastly, a lonely popcorn machine stands quite apart from everything else with its reptilian king doing some kind of froggy yoga on the roof.

The typically young and trendy Shibuyan crowd taking a break from whatever it is young and trendy Shibuyans do. The one on the bottom right seems to have already sunken into a low-power state (“digest mode”).

On this particular occasion, we made the fatal error of going at a time when we weren’t very hungry, despite me having intentionally skipped breakfast and cycled around 40 minutes from my house to Shibuya to burn off whatever fuel was left over from last night’s meal. I should have been hungry. Perhaps even ravenous. But I wasn’t. Nonetheless, my dining partner insisted on it, even though she herself wasn’t very hungry; such is the lure of the Paradise. Anyhow, after we’d paid, the clock started ticking and we got down to business. I’m definitely not fond of all-you-can-eat deals with time limits; it transforms what should be a slow, considered appreciation of the many dishes on offer into a self-destructing race to consume as much as possible as fast as possible so that you can repeat the process, quite literally, ad nauseum. But business is business I guess, and not getting your money’s worth here is a feat you’d have to try very, very hard to accomplish.

The food itself tasted good, but not outstanding; it’s typical of what you’d expect for the price and there’s nothing particularly unique here that you couldn’t find in some shape or form elsewhere. Additionally I would liked to have seen a stronger representation of local specialities like daifuku and dango. Patrons accustomed to Western tastes may be initially taken aback by the less-than-hearty serving of ingredients in the pasta sauces and toned-downed sugar levels in the desserts, but from what I’ve experienced here, it seems like that’s just how things are done in the Land of the Rising Sun. Lightness and subtlety can rule in the most unlikely places, and to be honest it’s nice to nibble on things whose aim, for once, isn’t to instantly overwhelm.

The selection of food and drink is impressive and easily Sweets Paradise’s strongest hand – despite my best efforts against a lukewarm appetite and against the clock, I simply couldn’t sample everything. Which is a right shame, as there didn’t seem to be one off-putting thing on the menu; and thoroughly irritating because I’ve been thinking about that mysterious sakura soft-serve ever since…

In a country famed for its high cost of living, affordable all-you-can-eat restaurants like Sweets Paradise are little miracles that must be exploited whenever possible. One of the best things about dessert buffets in particular is that cakes tend to be awfully expensive here in Japan, so it’s very easy to get your money’s worth and then some when it’s all-you-can-eat. For example, one small, albeit adorably presented slice of cake at a typical café can set you back around ¥500. Thus, as long as you can manage to eat at least 3 slices of cake in 90 minutes (God help you if you can’t), you’ve already eaten back more than the ¥1,480 that you paid to get in. And that’s excluding all the drinks you’ll be guzzling, and whatever you pile on from the rice and pasta bar, and whatever you manage to smuggle out in your pants for future consumption. A very sweet deal indeed.

Sweets Paradise
1F Chitose Kaikan
13-8 Udagawachō
Shibuya-ku
渋谷区宇田川町13-8ちとせ会館1F
Other locations available, check website for details.