Why you should experience Clinton St. Baking Company in Tokyo, Japan.
Clinton St. Baking Company is a comforting American bakery restaurant where Minami-Aoyama's polished character, New York brunch culture, Neil Kleinberg's celebrated pancakes and warm maple butter bring a Lower East Side institution to Kotto-dori.
Set along Kotto-dori near Aoyama-dori and just steps from Spiral, the two-level restaurant occupies a red-fronted corner of Minami-Aoyama where galleries, design businesses and fashion addresses extend south from Omotesando. Large street-facing windows brighten the dining room, with red and white finishes recalling the visual character established by the New York original. Pancakes anchor the table throughout the day, joined by omelets, eggs Benedict, brioche French toast and baked goods that extend the kitchen beyond its best-known stack. The result is a Minami-Aoyama restaurant where a distinctly New York approach to breakfast has maintained a Tokyo home since the height of the city's early-2010s pancake boom.
What you should know about Clinton St. Baking Company.
Clinton St. Baking Company is best known for bringing Neil Kleinberg and DeDe Lahman's acclaimed Lower East Side pancakes to Tokyo when its Minami-Aoyama restaurant opened on August 23, 2013. Kleinberg and Lahman founded the original Clinton Street Baking Company on Manhattan's Lower East Side in April 2001, beginning with a small bakery and coffee operation before breakfast cooking drew substantial crowds to the 32-seat restaurant. Wild Maine blueberry pancakes with warm maple butter became the signature, earning New York Magazine's Best Pancakes honor in 2005 and 2008. Bobby Flay challenged Kleinberg to a blueberry-pancake contest for Food Network's Throwdown! with Bobby Flay in 2009, extending the dish's reputation onto American television. Lahman and Kleinberg published the Clinton St. Baking Company Cookbook through Little, Brown and Company in 2010, assembling more than 100 recipes from the restaurant. Tokyo marked the company's first international expansion and opened as its second restaurant worldwide, with Kleinberg and Lahman present for the launch on Kotto-dori. The opening translated a restaurant born on Clinton Street into a 52-seat Minami-Aoyama operation, and crowds formed immediately on August 23 as the founders served small portions of pancakes to people waiting outside. Subsequent expansion carried the company into Dubai, Singapore and Bangkok, making the Tokyo opening the first overseas chapter of a brand built from a small Manhattan bakery.
The signature pancakes arrive three to a plate with a choice of blueberries, banana and walnuts or chocolate, their thick centers held beneath browned edges and finished with confectioners' sugar or the appropriate topping. Whipped egg whites folded into the batter supply much of the characteristic lift, producing a soft interior against the griddled exterior. Warm maple butter changes the dish through melted butter and maple syrup, coating the stack with a richer texture than syrup alone. Wild blueberries connect the best-known version directly to DeDe Lahman, whose childhood summers in Maine inspired their use at the original bakery before Kleinberg developed the pancake recipe. Brioche French toast, eggs Benedict and omelets broaden the breakfast repertoire, carrying the same substantial American brunch proportions across savory and sweet dishes. Clinton St. Baking Company builds the meal around texture and richness, moving from airy pancake interiors and crisp edges through fruit acidity, toasted nuts and the buttery finish that made the original New York stack famous.
How to fold Clinton St. Baking Company into your trip.
Clinton St. Baking Company works as the brunch destination within a Minami-Aoyama route connecting Fumihiko Maki's postwar architecture, Taro Okamoto's creative life and Kaichiro Nezu's collection of pre-modern Asian art.
Begin at Spiral, completed in 1985 for Wacoal from a design by Fumihiko Maki, whose continuous circulation route moves through gallery, cafe, atrium and performance spaces inside a building later honored with the 1987 Reynolds Memorial Award. Continue to Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum, preserving the Minami-Aoyama home and studio associated with one of twentieth-century Japan's major artists and placing his paintings and sculpture within the domestic setting where he worked. Conclude at Nezu Museum, founded from railway entrepreneur Kaichiro Nezu's collection and opened at his former Aoyama residence in 1941 before Kengo Kuma designed the museum building completed in 2009. The progression moves through Maki's 1980s cultural architecture, Okamoto's postwar art and Nezu's pre-modern collection before Clinton St. Baking Company returns the route to Kotto-dori for a New York breakfast tradition transplanted to Minami-Aoyama in 2013.
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