American cookie store Pug opens a pop-up in Tokyo for a limited time
Tokyoites get to enjoy a world of flavours on their doorstep, and now there's a new player on the scene bringing Boston cookies to the metropolis for a limited time.
Called 'Pug', this American cookie specialty store is actually a new Japanese-born chain, and it's putting its own twist on the classic recipe to suit local tastes. The name comes from the fact that the wrinkly surface of the cookies resembles a pug dog, and the tagline 'Chunky, Melty, Guilty' puts them firmly in the decadent indulgence category.
With stores planned for Kichijoji in Tokyo and Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture, and a store opening in Kawasaki's Musashi Kosugi on 24 April, the chain is kicking off proceedings with a pop-up at Shibuya's Miyashita Park from 28 March to 26 May.
▼ We stopped by the Shibuya store to check out the new cookies.
The first thing that stands out at the pop-up is all the variations on the menu. Staff are happy to help you out with suggestions, which led us to go all out with the 'Boston Cookie Crunch' (680 yen [US$4.78]), a Boston cookie on top of vanilla ice cream, with an espresso shot (250 yen) as a topping and milk (400 yen) as a side drink.
▼ You can't go wrong with milk and cookies.
We were immediately drawn to the cookie cup, which had a small gap between cookie and rim for us to dip our spoon into so we could pick up some of the ice cream beneath. As we scooped up the ice cream, the cookie began to crumble, revealing just how chunky and melty it was.
▼ Living up to the chain's 'Chunky, Melty, Guilty' tagline.
The cookie was so soft and warm it easily broke into gooey pieces, melding with the cold ice cream to create a tantalising texture filled with sweet, chocolatey, nutty flavours. This wasn't the end of the taste adventure, though, as we still had the espresso shot to pour all over the mix.
▼ Allpress Espresso, a New Zealand specialty coffee roaster with two locations in Japan, has partnered up with Pug to provide coffee for the chain.
The addition of coffee brought even more flavour to the mix, creating a perfect blend that combined the sweetness of cookies and chocolate, the refreshing taste of vanilla ice cream, the rich aroma of nuts, and the bitterness of freshly brewed espresso for a truly decadent experience.
With the espresso served separately, you can pour it on the mixture, enjoy it as is, or add it to your milk, giving you a variety of customisation options. When we were there, we saw loads of overseas customers lining up for a taste of Pug, adding toppings like caramel sauce and peanut butter to customise the cookie experience to their liking.
It's a fun new way to enjoy cookies, but the pop-up will only be in Shibuya until 26 May. Judging by the popularity of the store when we were there, we have high hopes that this is just the beginning for Pug, with more locations to come in future.
Store information PUG Limited-Time Pop-Up Store / 「PUG」期間限定ポップアップ Address: Miyashita Park South 3F Food Hall Open: 11:00 a.m.-10:30 p.m. (weekdays); 10:30 a.m.-10:30 p.m. (Sat, Sun, and public holidays) Until 26 May, 2025
Website (Instagram)
Photos ©SoraNews24
● Want to hear about SoraNews24's latest articles as soon as they're published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
[ Read in Japanese ]
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
5 hours ago
Sho Miyake's Tabi to Hibi Wins Top Prize at Locarno Film Festival
Paris, Aug. 16 (Jiji Press)--Japanese film director Sho Miyake's "Tabi to Hibi" (Two Seasons, Two Strangers) has won the top prize in the international competition division at the 78th Locarno Film Festival on Saturday. Miyake, 41, was handed the Pardo d'Oro, or Golden Leopard, prize at the award ceremony held in Locarno, southern Switzerland, on Saturday. This is the first Japanese movie to receive the award since 2007, when "Ai no Yokan" (The Rebirth), directed by Masahito Kobayashi, was given the prize. Tabi to Hibi depicts a story in which a playwright who gets stuck takes a fresh look at her life through an encounter during a trip. South Korean actress Shim Eun-kyung plays the role of the playwright. Japanese actor Shinichi Tsutsumi and Japanese actress Yumi Kawai also perform in the movie. The movie will hit the screen in Japan in November. [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]
The Mainichi
6 hours ago
- The Mainichi
Edging Toward Japan: The 'I am Spartacus' moment of the salarymen
Recently, while doing a workout at home, I flicked around TV apps and came across a documentary on Netflix called "Salaryman" (2021). It might seem an odd thing to be watching while lifting a few weights and doing my sit ups. The blurb for it didn't sound promising. It described the Japanese salaryman as a "corporate drone" and I braced myself for some predictably broadbrush Western stereotypes of the Japanese. As someone with a high appreciation for Japan's world-beating standards of service, their work ethic and dedication to professionalism, I rolled my eyes in anticipation of what misapprehensions this documentary was likely to contain. But, in fact, I could not have been more wrong: Allegra Pacheco's documentary turned out to be highly insightful. Originally from Central America, she arrived in Japan having worked a stressful office job in the shark pool of New York and came to Tokyo observing with a fresh eye the millions of corporate workers that filled its rush hour trains and streets. Her attention was particularly taken by the salarymen who collapsed drunk on the street after a night out quaffing with their colleagues and simply slept there, slumped in their crumpled suits. Pacheco traced around their bodies in chalk so that the white marks remained like murder scenes after they finally awoke the next morning to pick themselves up and return to the office. This was an astute signifier of lives wasted: Their chalked-around bodies were reminiscent of the bodies at Pompeii buried alive under the weight of some inescapable nightmare. The salarymen Pacheco interviewed described daily routines where their individualities felt crushed under the weight of conformity to the corporations they were bonded to. One young salaryman described how he lived in a company dorm with a hundred other workers, woke up at the same time as them every day, showered at the same time as them, ate breakfast with them, took the train to the office with them, worked all day with them, then was obliged to socialize with his co-workers in the evening before going back to the dorm at midnight and then repeating everything again the next day. Some salarymen reported that they were lucky to have an hour to themselves every day and very little sense of their own identity outside of their workplace. Some salarymen with families described how they only saw their children two or three times a week and left all aspects of childcare to their wives. These were, of course, the more extreme examples of the salaryman lifestyle -- plenty of salarymen have far more balanced and contented lifestyles. And yet, anyone who lives in Japan has probably encountered at some time or other some salarymen caught up in these patterns. A couple of drunken salarymen encountered by Pacheco outside a late-night bar optimistically described themselves as "Japanese businessmen". But as other commentators in the documentary pointed out, the true businessman is irreplaceable. Many of these drudge salarymen seemed more easily replaceable, required only to fulfill a monotonous role. Some of the salarymen interviewed described themselves as "slaves". Buried inside some of these vassal salarymen were artistic dreams of other lives -- one, realizing that his life was drawing to an end and that he had achieved nothing of what he had ever wanted to do, dropped out of the system altogether and went to live in a homeless encampment in a park and spent his days painting pictures. Watching a documentary about this made me think I had long since become normalized to the peculiarities of Japanese corporate culture. The salarymen were of course all around me in their hundreds and thousands, but they were not part of my world. I spent my time in Japan in universities and then in free-wheeling artistic pursuits. I had never worked as a salaryman, but the world of the salarymen has on a few occasions burst into my own existence. Once, for a couple of months, I stayed in a homestay. The husband of the house was a salaryman for a computer company and had very little free time to spend with his family. It was, I observed, a source of ongoing discontent for his wife and a considerable source of familial tension. At one point, he went away for an extended period to work in another part of the country, leaving the home feeling bereft of a father figure. Another time, I was putting out a book and worked closely with an editor at a publisher in Kyoto. This kindly man dedicated himself entirely to the company, even going to the library on his days off to look up obscure references on a manuscript we were working on. He was in late middle age, extremely well read and I once asked him if he had ever been to Europe. He told me yes, he certainly had. When I asked him where he had been, he elaborated that he had been there on a trip organized for the company employees -- they had spent a total of two nights in Europe, he happily recalled, one night in London and one night in Paris, and then flown home again. His existence and identity seemed entirely subsumed within the confines of the company. Pacheco is right that there can seem something tragic about the potential of lives sucked dry of individual freedom by the salarymen corporate structure. What exactly is it all for? Who in the end benefits from it? I mentioned to a friend the idea that some salarymen lived almost like slaves, but he chided me that even mentioning this was, for Americans in particular, a highly triggering subject, giving me pause. Yes, of course, no salaryman was a slave in physical chains, but since slavery was largely legally abolished around the world in the 19th century, great thinkers and artistic greats from Nietzsche, Sartre and Mill to Natsume Soseki and Bob Marley have continued to wrestle with the idea of "mental slavery", whether to forms of religion or emotional attachments or outmoded social structures, that can still condition and confine us in various ways. Looking at the images of the salarymen fallen down unconscious and sleeping on the street while being chalked around by Pacheco, you couldn't help concluding that for some people the corporate system wasn't working. I began to imagine these slumped figures all suddenly awakening simultaneously, standing up and proclaiming, "I am Spartacus!" and reclaiming their lives and freedom. Japan benefits in so many ways from the dedication of the millions of men and women in the corporate world and the traditional systems of lifetime employment that look after them. But for some people, that world represents less a universe of career opportunities and more a place of mental confinement which they need to break out of in order to recover their human potential. @DamianFlanagan (This is Part 69 of a series) In this column, Damian Flanagan, a researcher in Japanese literature, ponders about Japanese culture as he travels back and forth between Japan and Britain. Profile: Damian Flanagan is an author and critic born in Britain in 1969. He studied in Tokyo and Kyoto between 1989 and 1990 while a student at Cambridge University. He was engaged in research activities at Kobe University from 1993 through 1999. After taking the master's and doctoral courses in Japanese literature, he earned a Ph.D. in 2000. He is now based in both Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, and Manchester. He is the author of "Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature" (Sekai Bungaku no superstar Natsume Soseki).
Asahi Shimbun
20 hours ago
- Asahi Shimbun
Noted manga artist finally opens up about war experience
Having spent part of his childhood in northern China, manga maestro Tetsuya Chiba knew firsthand about the horrors of war and its aftermath. Yet, he ignored the subject for many years. 'I never thought my memory of war would become material for my manga,' said the creator of 'Ashita no Joe' (Tomorrow's Joe). 'War is nothing but sadness as well as ghastly and barbaric. I considered manga to be something that would energize the reader and allow them to lead a good life from tomorrow like the protagonist.' But Chiba, 86, now firmly believes that manga has the power to build peace. It took him decades to reach that point. For years after making his debut as a manga artist at age 17, Chiba did not dip into his wartime memories despite his experiences in what was then Manchuria. But his thinking changed around the mid-1960s when war manga became all the rage. 'All the works depicted the protagonist as a hero,' said Chiba, the first manga artist to be awarded the Order of Culture. 'They shot down enemy fighters, sank battleships and returned to base with a sense of fulfillment. That really caught me by surprise.' He recalled thinking that if children read violent manga, they would get the mistaken impression that war was cool. Between 1963 and 1965, he serialized 'Shiden Kai no Taka' (The hawk of Shiden Kai fighters). The protagonist, Jotaro Taki, was a pilot of the Shiden Kai fighter of the Imperial Japanese Navy. NEW REALISM What made Chiba's works stand out was the way he depicted not only the successes and heartaches encountered by the Japanese pilots, but also the American families who lost loved ones due to the bombings by the Japanese planes. He wanted to show that war is a tragedy for all sides. 'Even if I say I know about war, it was only a little since I was a child,' the artist said. Before drawing the manga, Chiba made a point of doing extensive research, visiting bases around Japan and reading the accounts of soldiers who survived as well as those who died while still young. He said it was a heartbreaking experience. When writing the war manga 'Shiden Kai no Taka,' Chiba decided the protagonist, Taki, needed to have a girlfriend as well as a mother he cherished dearly. 'I thought about what kind of life he would lead,' Chiba said. 'I thought he would likely become a good elementary school teacher. But it became difficult when I kept thinking about it, and there were nights when I could not get to sleep.' In the end, Taki is ordered on a suicide kamikaze mission. 'Even if he had a goal in life, he must perish by becoming a human bomb at the order of his superior, even if it was for the good of the nation,' Chiba said. Even after drawing that manga, Chiba never touched upon his own wartime experience. He remembered being thrown into the chaos of the war when it ended on Aug. 15, 1945, as local Chinese began rioting with the approach of Soviet forces. It was also bitterly cold. He felt close to death all the time. Chiba recalled playing with a friend only to find he had died during a sudden attack while right next to him and that flies had gathered over the body. He managed to board a ship taking Japanese home and noted that many passengers died on the voyage to Japan. The bodies were wrapped in cloth and dumped overboard. Those images remained etched in Chiba's mind, even when he was busy drawing several serialized manga simultaneously. The depiction in 'Ashita no Joe' of a boxer trying to make his weight before a fight coincided with Chiba's own feelings of hunger aboard the ship that brought him back to Japan. Childhood memories of the war returned when Chiba drew scenes for his manga about the Korean War. He said his experiences in Manchuria prior to returning to Japan gave him the footing to flourish as a manga artist. A Chinese friend of his father's allowed Chiba and his siblings to live secretly in an attic. Chiba came up with stories and drawings to entertain his younger brothers. 'That experience created the foundation for me as a manga artist,' Chiba said. 'I realized then that everything was connected. By that I mean during and after the war.' In his current serialization 'Hinemosunotari Nikki' (Diary at a languid pace), Chiba has drawn upon those war experiences. Due to failing eyesight, Chiba said he needed a magnifying glass to draw. With every deadline, he thought it might be the last manga he ever drew. But he took satisfaction in knowing that noted manga artists such as Shigeru Mizuki and Takashi Yanase drew well into their 90s. So, he reckons he has a few more years left. Chiba is also impressed by the works of younger manga artists who have created works based on the wartime experiences of their parents and grandparents. 'It is very difficult for those with no direct knowledge of war to research and draw in detail,' Chiba said. 'I am heartened and grateful that there are younger artists willing to take on that difficult task.' In his view, manga can contribute to a better world. 'If manga artists around the world drew works about what they thought about war, and if children who did not know about war read those manga, I am hopeful that when they grow up, they will share good ideas,' he said.
