Patisserie Pecheminion

Waiting more than an hour for cake

Such a Japanese thing to do. I wanted to get out of the house so I went on a bike ride along with the husband, knowing only the neighborhood and that cake was on the agenda. He said the shop opened at 12, but we arrived a bit later and it seemed like they had not opened yet, with about ten groups lined up waiting. One of the women in line told us they would open at one. I took off on my own for a while and came back with not much of a change to the line. Once the line moved enough that we could go into the tiny building, there was basically a continuing line inside to pay also. There are some packaged cookies and sweet breads (whole panettone), but we waited until getting close to the cake case and decided on one of each of the sliced cakes. In all, we waited for more than an hour, which seemed unnecessary. There were a lot of customers, but the real reason the line was long was that the staff were helping package up any ordered cakes and ringing up customers slowly. I think their digital system of manually entering all the prices was really slow. Everyone bought so many things probably just because they waited for so long. This is my problem with the way Japanese people think about businesses with long lines. It seems intentional so everyone will think it must be really good. The cakes were fine, but nothing to wait in line that long for. The owner is apparently French and they do sell some unique items (Paris Brest, for example, was nice) which I haven't seen elsewhere in Japan. Everything is written in French katakana and no one knows what it means exactly...haha.