6 days ago
Cafe turns Japan's most beautiful paintings into beautiful shaved ice dessert drinks【Photos】
Refreshing Hokusai woodblock prints you can drink arrive in time for summer.
Unimocc Art Cafe Gallery has a name that goes from cryptic to clear with impressive quickness. Part drink/dessert spot and part exhibition space, Unimocc's appreciation of the visual arts extends to the design of its food and drinks. The cafe serves up 'Canvas Cakes,' which come with palettes of creams and frostings to apply to your liking, and 'Art Mock Drinks,' which draw inspiration from famous paintings.
▼ Here, for example, is their previous Art Mock Drink for Edvard Munch's The Scream.
This summer, Unimocc is serving back-to-back salutes to Katsushika Hokusai, the most celebrated painter in Japanese art history. Hokusai was a prolific artist, but he's best known for the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series of woodblock prints, and the two most celebrated paintings from that series are serving as Unimocc's new dessert drink motifs.
Coming first is the drink modeled after Fine Wind, Clear Morning, more popularly known as 'Akafuji' ('Red Fuji'). Here, an artistically cut sheet of kanten (Japnese-style agar gelatin) is arranged on one side of the cup to stand in for the slopes of Mt. Fuji at sunrise. Accompanying this edible mountain are chunks of honeyed apple, yuzu citrus gelatin, and layers of ginger soda and blue soda (which has a sweet/tart apple flavor). The key ingredient, though, is the yuzu granita, frozen syrup with the consistency of shaved ice, which helps keep everything suspended in its proper place so that Hokusai's painting can be recreated within the cup.
The Fine Wind, Clear Morning is available now, but in mid-summer it'll be replaced by a different beverage that takes its cues from the most famous Japanese painting of all, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.
Here the drink base is grapefruit granita, with a deep-blue jasmine soda, jasmine gelatin, and frothy jasmine foam contributing to the ocean in a cup. An especially clever part of the visual package are the streaks of cream, hand-brushed by the cafe staff, on the inside edge of the vessel to represent the peaks of the crashing waves, and near the ocean floor you'll find sliced apple and a rich matcha green tea sauce, adding a bit of tantalizing bitterness to what promises to be a complexing compelling flavor profile.
The Fine Wind, Clear Morning drink is priced at 1,800 yen (US$12.40), and the The Great Wave Off Kanagawa is 1,700 yen. Concurrent with their respective beverages, Unimocc will also be offering Canvas Cakes for each as part of a drink set starting at 3,250 yen, with an additional charge if you elect to upgrade your beverage to an Art Mock Drink.
The Fine Wind, Clear Morning drink and cake will be on offer until July 21, while The Great Wave Off Kanagawa's time is from July 23 to September 19.
Cafe information
Unimocc Art Cafe Gallery
Address: Osaka-fu, Osaka-shi, Chuo-ku, Takomachi 6-3-25
大阪府大阪市中央区谷町6丁目3-25
Open 10 a.m.-9 p.m.
Closed Tuesdays (open if Tuesday is a holiday)
Website
Source: PR Times via Japaaan
Top image: PR Times
Insert images: PR Times, Unimocc, PR Times (2)
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