Happy Halloween! 👻🎃
How are you celebrating Halloween? Are you the one who is going out to parties or are you rather enjoy all the decoration coming out silently? I am rather the second group – you won’t find me at the streets of Shibuya on Halloween night. Although that October – just like the previous months – was quite packed with appointments and work for me, I somehow managed to visit some Halloween Afternoon Teas in Tokyo in the last few days before Halloween. And for sure I also tried some take-out sweets. Here I want to share this year’s treats with you.
How do I find Halloween afternoon tea in Japan?
Usually research is required before almost every afternoon tea visit for me. Fortunately, there are many Halloween afternoon tea and sweets buffets in Tokyo. Actually, I wanted to at least go to one sweets buffet, but when we finally decided on a day they were already fully booked… next year then! But with that, the hint: Especially if you want to go to a Halloween afternoon tea or sweets buffet on the weekend and towards the end of October, make a reservation beforehand!
If you can speak Japanese, finding Halloween Afternoon Tea is pretty easy. Simply enter 「ハロウィン アフタヌーンティー」 in the Google search and you will get numerous websites with overviews. Especially Fashion Press and OZmall were very helpful for me to get an overview. On the second page I also made the reservations, sometimes even with discounts on the actual price. Searching for Japanese hashtags on Instagram also gives a lot of ideas, but sometimes you have to do a little more research if the poster doesn’t share all the information in the post. For example, here is the hashtag #ハロウィンアフタヌーン.
As soon as you have found a great restaurant, find out about the prices, the time frame of the menu and whether you need a reservation. This is often needed and can often be easily made online.
Halloween Afternoon Tea at Café Zelkova
Café & Dining Zelkova is located in Omotesando. An elegant restaurant with an outside terrace, on which we have reserved seats in advance. As a Halloween special, the café offers a Purple Halloween Afternoon Tea in addition to individual dishes such as Halloween pancakes. The price for the afternoon tea is 4,543 yen + 10% service fee per person. The set includes three savory snacks, eight sweets and also an all-you-can-drink tea and coffee.
Because of the purple color, a lot of sweet potatoes were used for the dishes. Not exactly something I like usually, but overall everything was very tasty. Only two things weren’t really my taste, but the other delicious things made up for this, as well as the vanilla bourbon tea, which I drank two pots of. Definitely a recommandation for the future and I want to visit the café again for other occasions.
Halloween Afternoon Tea at the Q-Pot Café
I’ve always wanted to visit the Q-Pot Café in Omotesando and finally I made it there! The Halloween afternoon tea set looked just too tempting and since I had to go to Shibuya again anyway and there were still reservation slots open that day, I couldn’t resist. The afternoon tea itself costs 2,500 yen, which is a really good price for the café, which is usually not the cheapest one. This is including a drink from the normal menu or another +200 yen for the Halloween drinks, but even with that the total price was more than okay.
The set consists of three savory snacks (croissant, soup, vegetable skewer) and four sweets. The sweets in particular were visually impressive. In terms of taste, too, everything was delicious and sometimes even surprising. Especially the sour brain cake was a positive surprise!
The service on the day of our visit was not that great though (we had to wait forever for food and drinks), but I would still like to visit the café again.
A third Halloween Afternoon Tea was supposed to follow here, but unfortunately it was disappointing and didn’t make it on the blog...
More Halloween Sweets
Of course, there are not only cafes and restaurants where you can find Halloween sweets. From September onwards, the first shops usually start offering Halloween designs. Among other things, Starbucks Japan which had a sweet potato frappuccino this year – but yes, nothing for me than.
Instead I went for donuts, cakes and other things like that. Mister Donut and Krispy Creme have something to offer every year, but also many smaller shops around the city. All you have to do is keeping your eyes open and having some extra coings in you pocket. I particularly liked the two small cakes in ghost and cat optic, which I discovered by chance inside Omotesando train station.
I hope you are not too hungry now. If you want to see more food from Japan, you can also find some posts on my Japan Food Diary account on Instagram.
Have a happy Halloween everyone! 🎃👻