Narutoya [Mimi's World Tour]

Bakery: Narutoya
Address: 1 Chome-8-10 Shitennōji, Tennōji-ku, Osaka
Website: https://www.narutoya.net/
Style: Japanese 
Price: $

I love when I simply just stumble upon a bakery. This was the case with Narutoya, which I happened to walk past when I'd already had my daily allotment of bakeries. Oh well. Sometimes you have to make a sacrifice or two; in this case, that sacrifice entailed a few yen. :)

Like a few already done, Narutoya is an Osaka-area bakery chain with about half a dozen locations spread throughout the wards of the city. Essentially, it's your standard bakery in look and feel, with a wall of shelves of both sweet and savoury goods, along with loaves of bread. Of the sweet, there is little that differentiates itself from other bakeries and veritable stalwarts like melon and an pan looked better elsewhere. In a sense, it didn't fill me with the same excitement to try something as previous bakeries, even those I had encountered that very day.

Still, it's unfair to write off Narutoya completely, especially since it took one bite for me to change my outlook a bit. Yes, I grabbed a simple (and cheap) sugar doughnut (97 yen), but sometimes, the simple baked goods are a good indicator of the bakery itself. This little ring had the right texture for a yeast doughnut: nice and moist with just the slightest crust, slightly chewy. The super-fine, almost powdered sugar wasn't, in my opinion, the best choice, but it complemented the doughnut fairly well. Good stuff.

Rating: ***