Intersect by Lexus Tokyo serves a shaved ice dessert that requires flame to eat it

There’s a secret dessert hiding inside this Japanese flagship store.

Tokyo’s Omotesando area is home to a large number of flagship stores, and one of the best things about visiting them is you can often get a literal taste of the brand at cafes and restaurants inside the store.

In fact, a lot of them are home to tasty hidden gems that aren’t well-known to tourists, and we recently uncovered one such item at Intersect by Lexus — Tokyo, the flagship store for Toyota’s luxury car brand, Lexus.

▼ Intersect by Lexus — Tokyo is a three-minute walk from Omotesando Station.

▼ The three-storey building is home to a lounge, a clubroom, a garage that’s also used as a gallery, and a cafe.

We were here to visit the cafe, which is right by the front entrance, and the item we were looking for on the menu was the “Candy Plush“, priced at 1,300 yen (US$9.04).

We’d heard great things about this dessert online, and after a short five-minute wait, the dessert arrived at our table.

This Candy Plush is actually a kakigori (shaved ice) dessert, but this was like no other kakigori we’d ever seen. While the enormous mound on top of the bowl initially looked like a mountain of shaved ice, upon closer inspection, we could see it was actually cotton candy.

As you might expect from a top brand like Lexus, this dessert was visually stunning, but the appeal didn’t stop there.

The waiter pulled out a blowtorch and added flame to the dessert, melting away the cotton candy to reveal…

▼…a mound of beautiful shaved ice! 

The grand reveal reminded us of the moment a car cover is pulled off a new model at a launch event, creating a sense of anticipation and excitement you wouldn’t normally get with a shaved ice dessert.

▼ The melted cotton candy coated the strawberries and made them sparkle in the light, like a brand new car.

It was clear that a lot of thought had gone into the look of the dessert, but would there be attention to detail in the flavour too?

The flame had scorched the milk-flavoured cotton candy, sending out delicious aromas of sweet milk that had us salivating. When we tried a mouthful, we were surprised by the crunchy strawberry candy-like texture of the mix, which instantly elevated the dessert into another realm of deliciousness. Natural ice from Karuizawa is used to make the fluffy and pure white ice, creating a clean, refreshing accent to the sweet and milky cotton candy.

Every mouthful was milky, fruity, sweet and delicious, and once we got to the bottom of the bowl there was another surprise awaiting us…

▼ …ice cream!

The surprises seemed never-ending with this dessert, especially when we found out that the ice cream is made with a combination of condensed milk, fresh cream, and juice squeezed from cacao pulp, which is the white pulp that surrounds cocoa beans.

The ice cream imparted a refreshing sweet and tart flavour that complemented the strawberries, and because the vessel we were eating from was made of titanium, with a vacuum-insulated double-walled structure, there were no worries about the icy mixture melting, so we could take our time enjoying those final mouthfuls.

The dessert was served with a tiny cup of cacao vinegar, which could be added at any time to add more sweetness and tartness.

We added it at the end to get a good concentration of flavour and it turned out to be totally sublime, leaving us with a refreshing aftertaste.

The Candy Plush ticked all our boxes for everything we’d expect from a high-class dessert — not only did it include premium ingredients for maximum flavour, it combined them in unusual ways and topped it all off with a good dose of excitement with the fire-and-ice display.

Whether you’re looking to spoil yourself or impress a date, a stop here for dessert will become a memory to remember. And if you can combine it with a stop at Mercedes for yakisoba noodles, even better!

Restaurant information
Intersect by Lexus – Tokyo
Tokyo-to, Minato-ku, Minami-Aoyama 4-21-26
東京都港区南青山4-21-26
Open: 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m.
Website

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