Dapas [Mimi's World Tour]

Bakery: Dapas (ダパス)
Address: 6 Chome-1-12 Kagura 4 Jo, Asahikawa, Hokkaido
Website: https://ocean-bakery.com/
Style: Japanese
Price: $$ 

Also located inside the Asahikawa Road Station food court area, there's Dapas, a cafe/bakery specializing in rustic breads and buns. Seeing as it's not the most common site in a Japanese bakery to see so many crusty artisan breads with a variety of grains and fillings, perhaps this is what you go to Dapas for. Everyone, however, knows what I'm there for. I'm there for the sweet baked goods and, in that, I was pretty disappointed, because either Dapas doesn't make sweets or they were sold out (granted, a lot of the shelves were empty). Desperately scouring the (Japanese-only) labels for any sort of sweet filling, I was met with curry, egg, cream cheese.... You can almost say the sweetest thing they have is the soft ice cream.

Well, not quite falling in the savoury category and yet not quite sweet, there's the strawberry bun (180 yen). It's pretty much your take it or leave it option. And I took it. One single strawberry with a little drizzle of icing on top of it, nestled inside what probably closest resembles a ciabatta bun. The dough and filling were at complete odds with each other: the strawberry was soft and sweet, very nice in fact except it made the area around it pretty soggy, but the dough was hard and unyielding, something that didn't match at all with the delicate fruit in the middle, and it wasn't sweet at all. Maybe making it softer, adding some sugar or honey to the dough, making an egg bread would have created a more fitting - and tasty - sweet option?

Rating: **