Viron: Éclair Chocolat

Because I needed to visit a post office on a Sunday, I switched to going to Viron today, which is one building down from the Tokyo central post office, just across from Tokyo Station. My running was almost exactly 9 km/h the whole 10 km of the trip, though the first kilometer probably started slower, peaked above, and then settled back down. This also marks an expansion, finally, of my one-week  9 km-equivalent distance (not including the 21 km of padding to credit my routine walking) from 35.2 km on the 12th to 39.2 km today. Tomorrow, I'll take that to 40.8 km, if things go as planned, and stay about there for the next week, which I've already tentatively planned out through Saturday, though I'm not sure about Sunday, when I could expand to a 15 km run, though my only idea for a destination is Dalloyau and that's not enough to do an extra loop around the imperial moat course, although I could do a lap around the Akasaka Palace course, which I haven't done for quite a while. Also, there is a holiday on the first Thursday of November where I'm not busy in the morning but will be after that through the weekend, so I should probably do something special then, too, maybe get out to a new place that takes 15 km.

Unfortunately, I didn't see the new cakes that I thought I saw last time (so I'll need to try going a different time of day or day of the week, though it could just be that the other new cakes I saw were at the ends of their seasonal runs), so I settled for the Éclair Chocolat. It was definitely good, but I struggled between giving it the benefit of the doubt and calling it "excellent" and calling it just "good", and also possibly designating it not cake. Ultimately, I decided to go with good and cake, which still leaves Viron as a "near-great" shop, just closer to falling off that list. My complaint is that, though the chocolate custard (or cream; it wasn't obvious to me which) was definitely good, the crust was not as crispy as I expected. That's probably by design, since Japanese like their "choux" cream puffs (which Viron also had) soft, so it I'm not sure that the dough they use can even be called choux dough (though choux cream puffs in Japan still look like cabbage regardless of whether they are the soft kind or the crisp kind). This was also reflected in that this éclair was injection-filled through multiple holes in the bottom rather than being piped between to separate pieces. Of course, I'm not an expert on paté a choux and they're a pretty high-class place, so I expect that this éclair is without the normal range (i.e., not a doughnut with pretensions). On the plus side, it's only 432 yen with tax, so int terms of cost and calories, it makes up for the overindulgence of Saturday.