Eat

Cafés & Bakeries

Looking for a Hiroshima cafe? We’ve jittered our way across the city to bring you the best stops. Relax and appreciate the sweeter things in Hiroshima at local cafés and bakeries. Admire the steamed milk cat in your latte before you drink him. Enjoy a light lunch of vegan croquettes made with organic vegetables and served with fair-trade coffee. Visit a Japanese boulangerie then spend more time taking pictures of your slice of cake than eating it because it simply looks that good. Find a new appreciation for the changing of the seasons with traditional Japanese sweets, or discover the Showa charm of kissaten—traditional Japanese coffee houses. Our cafe and bakery roundup curates a Hiroshima trip recharge.

Toraya Flagship Store (虎屋本舗)

Toraya is a Japanese sweets shop in Fukuyama City. It sells sweets at the main store in Akebono-cho and at the Sansute Fukuyama store near JR Fukuyama Station. Its signature product is a dorayaki named “Ganso Torayaki,” which features a speckled sponge cake dough that looks like a tiger’s fur. The shop also sells cream puffs that look like takoyaki (octopus dumplings), cheese cakes that look like croquettes, and many other interesting sweets that make use of 400 years of traditional confectionary techniques.

Moment of Joy

Toraya Honpo also sells “Sokokuri Sweets,” an interesting sweet that looks like a dish that is anything but sweet. There are a total of eight different types of “look-alike sweets,” including a rare cheese cake that looks like croquette and a chocolate cake that looks like okonomiyaki. All of them are made using the traditional Japanese confectionary-making techniques cultivated at Toraya Honpo. The shop also sells a variety of less sweet Japanese sweets such as hassaku manju, which contains whole hassaku grapes from Hiroshima Prefecture.