It's no secret that I am a heavy sweet tooth, to the point that I have been called "The Candy Man" in my office. I once bought a kilogram of gummy worms and finished the bag of candy in the same working day, and it's an absolute mystery why I don't have any form of medical ailments. So, it should be no surprise (especially with the title) that I went and tried Sweets Paradise.
As the title explicitly states, Sweets Paradise is a chain of buffet restaurants specialising in desserts. I went to the Ikebukuro branch in Tokyo before going to a planetarium show with my girlfriend some time in August. Undeterred by a bout of torrential rain as we left the station, we walked (well, more like 'I wanted to walk'. My girlfriend has the patience of a saint sometimes) toward the building it was situated in. Located on the fifth floor, the only visible way to get up to it was by taking a relatively nondescript elevator in between some unrelated shops.
On getting out of the elevator, we were greeted by one of the workers, and we were asked which set we were in for. My kindergarten level Japanese picked up that the sets had different time limits, and some sets had restrictions on what we could pick up. If memory serves me correctly, we got the one and a half hour set with gelato for about 2,600 yen each. It sounds a bit pricey if you're tight on cash, but if you think you have a pretty big stomach, I highly recommend this set.
Walking to our table, I took stock of what was around me: lots of high school girls, lots of middle-aged women, and a lot of anime and food inspired decor. I realized that if I wasn't with my girlfriend during this visit, I would have looked like a fish out of water. To any readers that plan on going: go in a group, especially if you're a self-conscious guy. The other guys in this restaurant were with their family or friends. I can imagine a single man in his late twenties being stared down hard in this place.
Setting our stuff down at our table, I went to work filling my gullet. I started off with the actual food. There wasn't actually a lot of stuff in the way of a meal. There was a selection of pasta sauces to go with spaghetti noodles, some rice with two choices of curry, and a giant tub of popcorn with a selection of powdered flavouring. There were also some salads that I completely ignored. I came for the sweets, not leaves. I'm fairly particular when it comes to pasta and I like savoury, meaty flavours. Considering the selection of sauces, that meant I was kind of limited to two: the napolitan and meat sauces.
I paired the pasta with the "Sweets Paradise special recipe" curry. I don't recommend doing it, but it didn't taste bad. Having the two foods on their own would have been average, which is fair as the establishment is an all-you-can-eat place, after all. Even if it wasn't, the main even was the desserts. I polished off the food and went straight for the dessert racks.
They had a much wider variety of cakes and cheesecakes. I wasn't able to try them all before getting too full, but I did try ones that looked interesting to me. The desserts were all presented as whole cakes, but were cut into much smaller pieces. The serving size was very modest, so I think it is manageable to control yourself at the dessert buffet. The cakes were in slices, while the cheesecakes were in squares. Still others came in their own individual pieces.
I hit my limit with the desserts pretty fast, even if the portions were relatively small. I wasn't able to try all of the options, so I strategically picked out ones that I thought I would be able to enjoy. The ones I ate weren't from five-star restaurants by any means, but they were still quite tasty. The cakes had a mild, but solid flavour and their icing wasn't overpowering. The different cheesecakes had the same base flavour, but had very different accents. Some were subtly fruitier, while others were heavier with their cheesecake taste.
Although I was almost filled to the brim, I still had the gelato to try. I didn't pay an extra charge to skip out on them. The gelato section was placed in the centre of the dining area, and there were three freezers-worth of the frozen treats. I couldn't read some of the flavour names, as they used more kanji in this section, but they all looked pretty good. Some of them were touted as Haagen-Dazs, and all of them had a creamy texture that you'd expect from higher-middle end frozen desserts. The ice cream scoop they provided was again quite small, limiting your portion sizes, but at this point, I didn't mind. The flavours I sampled were all quite good and they went down well.
I sat at the table trying to digest everything for at least ten minutes, and we were still finished long before our time limit. The next time I go, (and believe me, I do plan on going again) I plan to take a bit more time and actually plan my route. The time limit you are given is actually quite generous, and even if you had room to demolish everything in the restaurant, you would probably still have some minutes to spare.
So, if you want a good bang for your yen and you have a sweet tooth, Sweets Paradise is a pretty good option. Thanks for reading, and I hope you try the place out if sweets are your slice of pie!
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