Cocoichibanya’s bakery is hiding in plain sight in Shinjuku.

Coco Ichibanya, also known as Cocoichi for short, is Japan’s most popular curry rice restaurant chain. But Cocoichi doesn’t just make curry rice, it also makes bread.

That doesn’t mean that you can walk into any old Cocoichi restaurant and order bread from the menu, though. You’ll need to seek out a branch of its sister chain, Spice Up! Cocoichi Bakery. Previously, the only place to find them was in Cocoichi’s home prefecture of Aichi but there’s also a Spice Up! Cocoichi Bakery location in downtown Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, not far from the SoraNews24 offices.

Their baked goods aren’t exactly cheap. The standard pork curry bread is 350 yen (US$2.40), quite a bit more than you’d pay for curry bread at a convenience store, and even a bit pricy by bakery/specialty shop standards. The other items we picked up on our bread run also came at a premium: black hashed beef bread (440 yen), cheese curry bread (390 yen), fried sweet bean bread with soft mochi (290 yen), and sakura mochi fried sweet bean bread (350 yen).

To see if their quality justified their high prices, we started our tasting with the most expensive of the bunch, the black hashed beef bread.

This bread gets its eye-catching color from a liberal amount of edible bamboo charcoal being kneaded into the dough, and the luxurious ingredients include red wine and demi-glace sauce too. Slicing the bun in half with a knife for a pre-bite interior inspection, we were happy to see nice, big pieces of beef inside, not just sauce.

We were then even happier when we took a taste. The black hashed beef bread was rich and flavorful, yet also expertly balanced in its flavor profile, neither too sweet nor too spicy.

High quality and wonderfully balanced flavor turned out to be the running theme of Spice Up! Cocoichi Bakery’s wares. The curry bread was excellent, but we’d sort of expected that given Cocoichi’s curry restaurant pedigree, but the big surprise was that even the dessert breads, the ones filled with mochi and sweet bean paste, were great, with an enticing chewy texture to their mochi centers.

So while there’s no getting around the fact that Spice Up! Cocoichi Bakery’s bread is expensive, after eating it we can’t really say it feels overpriced when it’s this good.

Shop information
Spice Up! Cocoichi Bakery
Attached to Cocoichibanya Shinjuku Eru Tower branch
Address: Tokyo-to, Shinjuku-ku, Nishi Shinjuku 1-6-1, Shinjuku Eru Tower basement level 2
東京都新宿区西新宿一丁目6番1号新宿エルタワーB2階
Website

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