Pierre Marcolini: Marcolini Chocolate Gateau

On Jan 3rd, finally got over to my next target café for two, the main Pierre Marcolini in Ginza. My interest was only in the cake, which they call Marcolini Chocolate Gateau. It's a café dessert, but one could image whipped cream sold on the side, so I'm going to go ahead and list it with other cakes. It was excellent, as a quite dense moist cake. I ordered it with the Marcolini Cacao Tea, which was interesting but I got tired of pretty quickly, so I can't recommend more than a taste.

For completeness the other dessert was the Marcolini Brussels Waffle, seasonal Cacao flavor. As it happens, ice cream and waffles doesn't work for me. I should of recommend the parfait. Actually, I had their vanilla soft-serve ice cream the day before in Shinjuku, and it was excellent.

Running, over a few days. I did a couple neighborhood course "clumps" of loops, the Suga-chou clump and the Soka Gakkai clump, which covers the neighborhood course between Yotsu 3-choume, Yotsu, and Shinnomachi stations, which only adds up to about 5 km.

For new loops, I finished off the Aobadai central loop, which gives access to both directions and sides of the Meguro River around Nanakameguro Station. I also completed the Ebisu 4 loop (two different days), which gives gives further access to loops leading up to immediately east of Meguro Station before dead-ending.

Pierre Marcolini, Éclair Vanille

Thursday, I did a lot of food shopping errands, starting with visiting Pierre Marcolini, which had four éclairs I haven't tried. Since it will probably be a long time before I'm back and finding something great that's about to disappear would be less useful, I went with one of the two standards rather than the seasonal ones, and got Éclair Vanille. The filling is vanilla, but obviously there is some red fruit on top. This is one of the quite fine shops that I've only had two cakes from and I decided that this éclair was excellent, so they stay on that list. This is despite the crust not seeming to be the traditional choux pastry, but was rather soft. Maybe I'm influenced by the high-end atmosphere, but in any case, this remains as some place that I would like to visit again. Actually, I'd like to visit the salon and get one of their salon deserts, but like the éclairs, everything is about double what you would except from an ordinary shop, though they are not trying to be ordinary. I think eventually I'll do it, but it might not be until October. Interesting trivia: if you pay by cash, they round down to multiples of 10 yen.

I'll include Friday here, since no food is involved: I went for a long run that took about 3 hours, though I walked on stairs and crowded places, so maybe close to 2 hours actual running. The balance was good, and I was still running well at the end and am ready to run again on Saturday, though there was a lot of stretching between. Back to the trivial details for Friday. I did the recently altered Jinguumae--Kita-Aoyama south loop counterclockwise, so that route is confirmed. The main goal was to do counterclockwise the Daikanyama-chou--Ebisunishi--hachiyama-chou--Nanapeidai-chou--Shibuya--Uguisudani-chou loop, which is 9.75 km long and has a lot of stairs and slopes (as well as churches as sites). Along the way, I first confirmed the current (until the construction on the southeast corner is finished) updated Dougenzaka south loop (1.1 km), but later failed trying to do the Maruyama-chou--Shinsen-chou loop (I did the first turn at the correct intersection, but onto the wrong street (it's a five-way intersection). I didn't try to do connecting Dougenzaka north loop. I'm going to call the main Daikanyama... loop a success. Actually, I turned early at the end, but it was dark and a long run and I could immediately see that it was wrong (and the reason for not turning there is not that important), so I'm not going to ding myself for it, or I can never do long runs in the dark. So I'm done with that area for now, and I'll move over to in front of and south of Roppongi Hills for the run Saturday afternoon, where I've really only run a little bit, though I've previously done runs to officially add those loops to the neighborhood course, while consulting a map.

Pierre Marcolini, Éclair Chocolat

Did a run to Ginza, the long way down to Aoyama-douri, to avoid congested areas and have some open stretches to do some faster running. I set my timer to 1-min intervals and managed to get in 5 60-second stretches of relative fast running, which was the first time for a while, so I wasn't too ambitious. That kind of interval training is supposed to increase stamina (specifically, mitochondria), though it obviously is good for building muscle as well.

Today, unlike last Friday, Pierre Marcolini was not sold out of éclairs, in fact they were sending people out into the street to make sure that you didn't walk by them without noticing the shop (they are not helped by the big construction on the main road, which sort of discourages people from going down their side road). They had four éclairs available, including the passion fruit that I had last time (or maybe it was a different passion fruit one; it's not worth checking now). Having had a fruit one, I decided to have the Éclair Chocolat, since they are a chocolatier. I was much more willing to run back until I got the bag and then reverted to not wanting to running carrying things in my hand (now that my left arm at least seems to be in good shape) and walked back. Of course, then I stopped to groceries and then had several kilograms to carry in one hand (because the right arm doesn't seem up to it), so I'm not sure I shouldn't have gone home first and come back with a big backpack and a bicycle.

Éclair Chocolat was definitely good, so I can say tentatively that this is a definitely good shop but it didn't convince me that I needed to be a hurry to try the caramel and pineapple ones, which were the other flavors available---maybe next time they are at Isetan.

Pierre Marcolini: Éclair Saison (Passion Fruit)

Went to Ginza Mitsukoshi to finally get the choux cream from Frédéric Cassel, just to get ahead or not get behind on the top shop with available new cakes while I work on catching up excellent shops to 5 cakes each and  digging deeper in the line-ups of shops that might deserve up-grades (which includes one of the previous category that did well, Ryoura). Unfortunately, they were sold out of that item, maybe because of a SMS post of a similar item and it being a Friday night, when one is always lucky to find anything. Of course they had other cakes I hadn't sampled, but nothing I was particularly interested in, so, after verifying that Origines Cacao at Ginza 6 still has none of the great cakes of a few years ago, I went with finally visiting a new shop, Pierre Marcolini, which in Tokyo only has something cake-like at their Ginza mother store (they are a chocolate brand, but mostly use ice cream as bait at their shops/counters). I wanted to visit here because of their visit to Isetan (I waited to long to try to buy an éclair there, and they had switched to less perishable items).

I'm calling this Éclair Saison (Passion Fruit), which is slightly different from Éclair Passion Fruit (shown elsewhere online) in having macaron shells and white chocolate disks; no complaint here. Actually the filling base is white chocolate too, which makes sense for a chocolate shop. Interestingly, they rang this up with a 6 yen discount to round it down to the nearest 10s/50s/250s. This was definitely excellent. Maybe I should always choose fruit flavors when it comes to éclair (I choose it over pineapple and coconut, which was the only other flavor left that time of night, whereas they've been completely sold out the other time I went, to verify their location), though I suspect the choice of white chocolate over some sort of custard cream as the base filling is important.