Cow & the Moon

When you’re awarded the best gelato in the world, you have some serious bragging rights. Cow & the Moon has earned those bragging rights – but does their gelato live up to the hype? I visited on a Saturday after lunch and was delighted not to have to line up. We got a few flavours to share, starting with the sorbets – apple & wasabi and black on black (blackberry). First up, let me say that the texture of these sorbets is really something special. They’re so thick and creamy for something without dairy! Black on black was tasted just like biting into a blackberry chewy lolly – rich, a bit tart and really luscious. I expected the wasabi to hit me in the face with the apple sorbet, but instead it was beautifully subtle, rounding off the sharpness that green apple usually has and adding complexity on the back palate. Yum. We also tried the hazelnut roche (so, so good), but my highest praise went to the divine fig and walnut gelato – it tasted golden and I could have devoured bowls and bowls of it. So the answer is yes, it does live up to the hype – check them out!

Cow & the Moon, 181 Enmore Road, Enmore, NSW, no website

Ujicha Gion Tsujiri

After an amazing dinner on Pontocho-dori, we wandered across the river to Gion, Kyoto’s famous geisha quarter, also famed for its tea stores. I had a real craving for icecream, and was a bit sad to see so many stores closed for the night along Shijo-dori, the main street. But when I spotted a couple of people walking along with soft serves in hand, we kept going and eventually found Ujicha Gion Tsujiri serving take aways. Yes! I hadn’t had many traditional-flavoured icecreams on this trip, so I picked the more exotic of the two options – hojicha, rather than the standard matcha. Hojicha is a green tea that’s been roasted over charcoal, giving it a more complex, smoky flavour. This was evident even from the colour, which was more a khaki than bright green. I absoutely loved it. The flavour had more bitterness than your standard icecream, but the roasted flavour really added a lot of depth and it tasted like what I imagine tea with cream would be like. The texture was rich and creamy, as soft serves should be, and I devoured the little cupful happily.

Ujicha Gion Tsujiri, 573-3 Gionmachi Minamigawa Shijo Dori Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto http://www.giontsujiri.co.jp/gion/store/kyoto_gion/#_=_

Sage Dining Rooms

Part one is here. The second main was agnolotti with mushrooms, truffle, pine nuts and a creamy bone marrow sauce, and this was my favourite of the two. I loved the rich cream sauce and the pairing of truffle with forest mushrooms. The pasta was clearly house-made and had a lovely bite. Looking at the dish, I just wanted to dive right in, with all that beautiful grated parmesan on top! By this point we were getting very full – I sipped at my mocktail (strawberry and mint lemonade – uttery divine and something I will go back for) and enjoyed the Autolyse bread with butter and salt, topped with a truffle crisp (the strongest truffle flavour of the day). The first dessert was the sweet and it was at its best with a mouthful capturing all of the elements – the sweet waffle, the not-very-sweet icecream, the shaved truffle and the salty popcorn. Everything worked perfectly to create a complex, sophisticated dessert. Finally, we finished with truffled brie, served with thyme-infused leatherwood honey and a neutral, very thin crispbread. The thyme made the honey almost savoury – again, trying the dish with all the elements in one mouthful yielded the best flavour. Sage, you sure know how to make a first impression! The Sage truffle lunch is on until the end of July as part of the Canberra Truffle Festival.

Sage Dining Rooms, Batman Street, Braddon ACT                     http://www.sagerestaurant.net.au/

Kagetsudo

I was lucky enough to be in Tokyo for Sanja-matsuri, one of the city’s largest festivals, held in Asakusa. Unfortunately, this meant that many of the district’s traditional stores had queues out onto the street for blocks to pick up their specialties. Kagetsudo’s specialty is melon-pan (melon bread), which they make in jumbo-size, but as the queue was a bit silly, we decided just to try their soft serve icecream. There are about thirty odd flavours to choose from, including only-in-Japan flavours like matcha and red bean paste. I picked sakura, which also falls into that category, and was surprised at how large the portion was. It was piled up in a perfect soft serve spiral and we hung around near the store to enjoy it. The icecream was really creamy and, as expected, had a beautiful floral flavour. The sakura tasted so familiar, and we decided that it was a bit like rose, but not quite. There were also little crispy bits inside the serve, which we decided was crystalised petals, but we couldn’t be sure. I’d love to come back to try both the melon-pan and more of the soft serve flavours.

Kagetsudo, 1-18-11 Asakusa, Taito-ku, Tokyo                             http://www.asakusa-kagetsudo.com

Ladurée

On my last day in Tokyo I spotted something I hadn’t seen before – a Ladurée icecream store! It’s part of the store in the Lumine 2 complex, just outside Shinjuku station (on the JR side), and I couldn’t help myself. I ordered the icecream interpretation of the Ispahan cake I’d had at their Ginza store, which I’d fallen in love with. The icecream itself was a creamy soft-serve and had a delicate rose flavour. The portion was huge but what made it completely delicious and decadent was the array of toppings. There was a raspberry sauce, rose crystals, fresh lychee slices and raspberries, and a raspberry macaron shell crumbled over the top. Yep, not even kidding. I’m not generally a huge fan of rose as a flavour, but the icecream was so soft and the flavour went so well with the toppings that I polished the whole lot off. The macaron crumble added a good bit of texture and of course the fresh raspberries were perfection. I also grabbed a Marie Antoinette macaron from the store, which was flavoured with their tea of the same name – it was everything you would expect from this sweets stalwart.

Ladurée, Shinjuku Lumine 2, 1F, 3-38-2 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo   http://www.laduree.jp/

Tide Pool Cafe

I revisited many of my old haunts on this trip to Tokyo, and one of the most lovely was the Tide Pool Cafe in Kichijoji. It’s a bit out of the way on the path leading to the park, but I have fond memories of sitting there with a glass full of icecream doing my translation homework. This visit was a great reminder of why I loved this place so much – it was another warm day and we stopped in for icecream and to get out of the sun for a bit. The ladies explained the three icecream flavours and we picked two to try – vanilla and cafe au lait. They were both beautifully presented in glass teacups, with fresh strawberries on the vanilla and a huge dollop of whipped cream on top of both serves. The vanilla was surely made from buttermilk – the flavour was so rich, creamy and genuinely vanilla, not essence or imitation. Similarly, the cafe au lait had a gentler coffee flavour, as would be expected, but was incredibly refreshing and not sickly sweet. The ladies kindly lent us fans to cool down and were very welcoming of hot and bothered tourists, just as they were of an intrepid student all those years ago.

Tide Pool Cafe, F&W Building, Musashino, Kichijoji, Tokyo Japan, no website

Brooklyn Parlour

Dessert before dinner is one of those beautiful things that being an adult makes possible, and I’m convinced it’s even more legit when you’re on holidays. So I stopped by Brooklyn Parlour for dessert. Before dinner. Yep. I was given the choice of a solo or share table when I arrived, and I picked the share table – it was in the middle of the basement space and gave a great people-watching view amid the floral arrangements and bookshelves. I started out with a pot of peach and apricot tea, which was bright pink when I poured it and lightly aromatic to taste. For dessert I chose the red berry, pistachio and chocolate mousse glace (icecream). The berry coulis around the icecream was full of raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and cranberries, and added a nice tartness to contrast the sweetness of the chocolate. The mousse-icecream was mostly frozen but soft enough to eat and silky smooth, with a rich but not-too-rich milk chocolate flavour. The real delight was the layers of frozen raspberry and pistachio inside the icecream – aka heaven. One of the best desserts I’ve had in a long time, and in one of the coolest venues.

Brooklyn Parlour, OIOI Anex B1F, 3-1-26 Shinjuku, Tokyo Japan           http://www.brooklynparlor.co.jp/shinjuku/