Depends.
A notoriously difficult cafe to get a slot for, after much perseverance and patience, I managed to get a slot for my friend and myself on the weekend after Japan’s Golden Week, so off we went to Sumida Ward, where Tokyo Skytree is located.
Note: between my friend and I, she’s the Kirby fan while I’m the ‘extra friend you bring to cafes because you need photos of the food and drinks’, which is why I tagged along.
We went for one of the many late afternoon slots as my friend had a prior engagement, so after meeting up at Ueno, we decided to take the chance to go down at Asakusa, then walk to Tokyo Skytree for exercise.
Midway to Skytree, we found this rather hilarious sculpture (?) at Genmori Bridge.
After much walking, we finally made it to Skytree and the cafe.
While waiting to be seated, we were informed that the whole duration of the cafe was 85 minutes long, and that we could only order our food once.
Cue both my friend and I pondering over the menu seriously as soon as we got seated, all because we could only order once, no additional orders to be entertained.
We decided to go all out and order the ones that we wanted to eat, knowing that if we decide to go back again, it may be a year or two from now.
The one dish that we decided on, as well as to share, would be the Car Mouth Kirby, which debuted in Kirby and the Forgotten Land.
Spoiler alert: everything on the plate was not yummy.
I still don’t understand why they used cheese.
Cafe time was rather short, so it was mostly us just trying to finish the food and drinks before our time was up.
Final thoughts:
I did enjoy my time in the cafe, despite never having played this game, but found the whole experience too hectic; what was even the reason for not allowing the guests to do additional orders? The cafe can easily designate a specific time slot for them to stop taking orders, which a lot of collaboration cafes do, so why can it not be implemented here?
Second, I found the cafe duration too short; I understand that they want to accomodate as many guests as possible, but I’m sure there’s a better system that they can come up with to extend cafe time and accomodate everyone. Or better yet, have a second Kirby Cafe somewhere in Tokyo; a lot of locations come to mind.
Lastly, as with almost every cake I have ever tasted in this country, it was all for show. It tasted awful.
They’re totally not living up to the phrase hana yori dango (花より団子)…!
While I know I should not be critical over cafe food, would it actually kill them to make the cake tasty? Everything else was fine, except for the very thing we were aiming for; then again, I should have known that it would come to this.
Disappointed, but not surprised.
However, if you would like to try and see the cafe for yourself, you can try and reserve a slot from here (Tokyo) or here (Hakata).
Seats for next month can be reserved every 10th of the month for both locations, although Tokyo’s reservation is set to a specific time (18:00).
Ex. if you plan to visit the Kirby Cafe in Tokyo on September 2022, you can only make a reservation for it on August 10, 2022, from 18:00 (JST).
I do plan to still visit collab cafes but at a less hectic pace, if that is even a thing.
Till the next cafe visit!
Wanderlust 