Qualita [Mimi's World Tour]

Bakery: Qualita (クアリタ)
Address: 16 Chome-1 242 Minami 1 Jonishi, Chuo Ward, Sapporo, Hokkaido
Website: https://sapporo-qualita.com
Style: Japanese
Price: $$ 

This takes the award for the worst bakery experience on my Hokkaido trip.

Qualita is located on the ground floor of an apartment building and is pretty easy to miss. Upon passing through the automatic door, there's barely enough room for three people and you're immediately greeted with the small selection of mostly rustic loaves of bread and savoury options. You really come to appreciate the typical tray-and-tong bakery system in most Asian bakeries when you step into a tiny space like this bakery and are faced with a small counter of baked goods, behind which you have two otherwise unoccupied workers smiling awkwardly at you while you try and decipher all the labels.... Online reviews mention the presence of danishes, but the only thing resembling danishes were the plain croissants. Besides that and a red bean bun, I had a very hard time finding anything sweet. After the fact, I see their website didn't really have all that much besides those aforementioned danishes. As such, Qualita is not the place to go for sweet baked goods. But being the only customers with two workers eagerly awaiting my order, I felt bad walking out and didn't know enough Japanese to ask which were sweet.

So I quickly read "cream" and asked for that one, located right next to the croissants. The worker announced "cream cheese pan" (194 yen) to the one at the cash and I immediately had misgivings. That was my fault though, I'll admit that. Well, sweet it was not, though it had the potential to be. Instead, it was the world's chewiest bread. The crust of the bun was simply unmanageable. I tore, I chewed, I chewed some more. I don't even understand how it could be so tough. Inside, there was simply a giant wad of cream cheese, probably enough for you to generously spread onto three bagels. It was so thick and sticky and yet it wouldn't stick to the dough around it, but remained as one big chunk of cheese. Oh, there was also a giant piece of butter attached to one end of the cream cheese ball. Three components with zero compatibility with each other. Total failure.

Rating: *