Clair de Lune, Passion Chocolat

As planned, I ran up to the Clair de Lune in the Marui just across from Ueno Station, which is about a kilometer closer each way than going to the main store. Taking the shortest route, I run down a short seedy hostess bar street, which is no big deal (it's well lit and loudspeakers repeat the local police saying that I shouldn't trust anyone who tries to lure me in and that such action is illegal, though there are still people in front of individual clubs/bars who presumably know what they can get away with; probably they'll talk to you if you go up to them, but otherwise are just standing there or talking to each other while they wait for someone interesting to come along) and then the crowded back streets of cheap shops and food stalls on the other side of the main street, but it's okay.

I hadn't looked around in the basement of Marui before, just verified that Clair de Lune was there (and they're right at the bottom of the escalator), so I hadn't noticed that it was mostly eat-in places rather than counters for take-out, not like the department store food areas, maybe more like parts of Tokyo Midtown, but cheaper. Anyway, I could eat in-at a spacious counter next to the cake shop counter. I got the Passion Chocolat, though there were a few other more basic options that I haven't tried yet, and I probably should have chosen a piece having more chocolate, since there was variation in the balance between them and I was given a choice. Still, it was a good flavor, as good as I've gotten in good passion fruit and chocolate cakes from elsewhere, maybe even from JPH, though the bottom biscuit did not impress me. The aftertaste of the cake was sort of gingery, which I couldn't detect over the passion fruit when I was eating it and also might be unrelated to the biscuit. The biscuit was not bad, just it was a dense chocolate cake with no particular character and I wanted something more dramatic to contrast with the passion fruit and chocolate cream/mousse. There was some crunch element between cake and cream as well, but also not sufficient to make much impression. It was definitely good cake and I wasn't really disappointed, but it's going to be hard to keep this shop in the quite excellent group, which I knew from the beginning. I need to get another cake from Del'Immo before visiting Clair de Lune again, since it's a potential rival.