ig cafe

After French class on Tuesday, I went to the Hilton Plaza to check out the Ig Cafe for lunch. The chef, Hiroshi Yamaguchi is also the chef at the Kobe Kitano Hotel. He has several bake/sweet shops named Igrek (French for the letter "Y") or in this case just "Ig".

The Ig Cafe serves lunch and dinner and also has a take-out menu. I was surprised that the cafe wasn't crowded during the lunch hour.

I chose Lunch A 1600 yen (about US$16), which was a combination of the Norwegian "smorgas" and French "tartine"--which I understand both are open-faced sandwiches. Lunch started out with some soup (potato and beet), loved the flourescent swoosh of beet in the soup. A salad and then the open-faced sandwiches. You can pile condiments onto your toast or just eat them on the side. There were marinated shrimp, hard boiled egg, pickles, pork, sauerkraut, butter & homemade tartar sauce(in the jar). I loved that they had different types of breads too, multi-grain, pumpernickel, not the white bread that you would normally see in Japanese cafes.

The lunch also came with dessert, a caramel pudding topped with pear and gelatin. Just enough sweet from the pear and gelatin and the caramel pudding a little bitter but the whole thing balanced. Since the lunch came with a drink, I chose the cappuccino. Though the cappuccino art was kind of lacking (sorry it wasn't pretty), the crema was really good.

I'll be back.

Ig Cafe
Hilton Plaza West 3F
2-2-2 Umeda
Kita-ku, Osaka
Phone: 06.6452.1919
Open: 11:00-21:00