Century-old dorayaki specialist in Ginza is asking for a little more considerateness from its recently expanded foreigner fan base.

Usually when you come across the traditional Japanese dessert called dorayaki, they’re round, looking like two little pancakes with a layer of anko (sweet red bean paste) sandwiched between them. However, at Kobikicho Yoshiya, a sweets shop located on one of the backstreets of Tokyo’s Ginza neighborhood, they come folded in half like this.

The reason why is that Yoshiya’s original founder wanted their dorayaki to be shaped in a way that kabuki actors could snack on them without opening their mouths too wide and smearing their stage makeup. That might sound like a very old-school design criteria, but Yoshiya is a very old-school place, having been in business for 103 years and counting.

However, while Yoshiya is committed to doing things the old-fashioned way, making its dorayaki by hand and without preservatives, they’re now facing a modern problem. Recently, the shop has found its way onto the radars of foreign tourists, and many of them have been reserving boxes of dorayaki but never picking them up or paying for them.

“Almost all of the foreign tourist shoppers who make reservations [for our dorayaki] do not come to pick up their orders,” the Yoshiya official Twitter account posted on November 11, going public with a lament the store has had for some time now.

Like many small, family-owned sweets shops in Japan, Yoshiya tends to produce its wares in modestly sized batches. It’s not unusual for the morning stock to sell out before noon, and when that happens, walk-in customers can reserve boxes of dorayaki to pick up later that afternoon. The confectionaries can also be reserved over the phone or through the Line smartphone messaging app.

Recently, though, instances of foreign tourists reserving sweets but not coming to pick them up have become a near-daily occurrence, the shop says, sometimes happening two or three times in a single day. This causes multiple problems for the store. As mentioned above, Yoshiya’s traditional dorayaki recipe means that they don’t keep for very long. The store recommends eating them no later than one day after they’re made, and as such doesn’t want to sell customers day-old leftovers, and so reserved dorayaki that aren’t picked up are disposed of when the store closes for the night. Not only does this mean the ingredients go to waste, since Yoshiya generously allows customers to pay for their reserved items at the time of pick-up, that means the store doesn’t get paid for the unclaimed reserved dorayaki either.

However, the purpose of the tweet regarding the unclaimed orders wasn’t made out of anger, but rather to raise awareness of the issues such behavior is causing for the store. “This has become a very big problem for us, as we cannot flatly refuse [requests to reserve dorayaki],” the tweet goes on to say, and Yoshiya’s owner says they have no intention whatsoever of instituting a policy of not taking reservation requests from foreign customers. The owner also believes that some of the non-pick-ups could be the result of foreign shoppers not understanding the reservation system, as there have been times when customers who reserved a box but never came to pick it up in the afternoon come back to the store the next day to see if there are dorayaki available.

“Not all foreign customers who reserve dorayaki fail to pick them up,” the shop said in a follow-up tweet. “There are, of course, [foreign customners] with common sense as well, so we ask everyone to not forget to pick up your orders.”

Some online commenters have suggested implementing a required pre-payment for reserved orders, but Yoshiya isn’t ready to take that step just yet, citing the cost of setting up such a system. So for now, they’re hoping that the appeal for consideration from foreign customers will be enough to keep from souring the sweets deal.

Shop information
Kobikicho Yoshiya / 木挽町よしや
Address: Tokyo-to, Chuo-ku, Ginza 3-12-9
東京都中央区銀座3-12-9
Open 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Closed Sundays, holidays, and on irregular Saturdays
Website

Source: J-Cast News via Itai News, Twitter/@kobikicho_y (1, 2)
Top image ©SoraNews24
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!