Why you should experience Saint Marc Cafe Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden in Tokyo, Japan.
Saint Marc Cafe Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden is a relaxed bakery cafe where Shinjuku Gyoenmae's garden-side calm, fresh-baked pastries, coffee and the brand's signature Chococro provide an easy counterpoint to the dense commercial streets farther west.
Set along Shinjuku-dori near Shinjuku Gyoenmae Station and just steps from Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, Saint Marc Cafe Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden places one of Japan's familiar cafe formats beside the district's great expanse of trees and lawns. Bread and pastries move through the ovens across the day, filling the room with butter and toasted dough while coffee, parfaits and light dishes stretch the stop from breakfast into the afternoon. Chococro brings a crisp croissant-style shell around warm chocolate, giving a small pastry enough richness to work beside black coffee without turning the stop into a full meal. The result is an easy Shinjuku Gyoenmae cafe for shifting between the garden and the surrounding streets with something warm from the oven in hand.
What you should know about Saint Marc Cafe Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden.
Saint Marc Cafe Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden is best known for belonging to a cafe business launched by Saint Marc in March 1999 with its first directly operated coffee shop in Chuo City, Tokyo, extending a restaurant company whose roots reached back to the establishment of Omoto Saint Marc in March 1989. The parent business opened its first Bakery Restaurant Saint Marc the following month, changed its name to Saint Marc in July 1990 and moved its headquarters to Okayama in April 1991 before entering the coffee-shop market at the end of that decade. Saint Marc reached Japan Securities Dealers Association registration in December 1995, then carried the cafe concept into a period of rapid diversification that included Hakodate Ichiba in 1999, acquisition of Prime Time in 2002 and the first Bakery Restaurant Baqet in Itami that October. Tokyo Stock Exchange Second Section listing followed in April 2002 and First Section listing in March 2003, while the first Kamakura Pasta opened in Okayama in October 2004. A major 2006 restructuring converted the operation into Saint Marc Holdings and separated its restaurant businesses into specialized subsidiaries, including Saint Marc Cafe, creating the corporate structure through which the coffee-shop brand continued its national expansion. The present Saint Marc Holdings group also encompasses Kamakura Pasta, Saint Marc Grill, La Madrague, Kyoto Katsugyu and Gyukatsu Motomura, placing the cafe inside a restaurant organization whose portfolio has grown far beyond the bakery restaurant from which Saint Marc began.
Chococro puts chocolate inside layered croissant-style dough, baking the exterior toward a brittle flake while the center softens into a dense seam of cacao richness. Seasonal Chococro variations change the filling while preserving that contrast between laminated dough and a concentrated center, making one compact pastry the most recognizable item associated with the cafe name. Coffee brings roast bitterness against the chocolate, while sandwiches and other baked items move the counter toward a light lunch. Parfaits and dessert drinks take the menu in a colder, sweeter direction, letting the cafe shift naturally from morning pastry into an afternoon stop after several hours in Shinjuku Gyoen.
How to fold Saint Marc Cafe Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden into your trip.
Saint Marc Cafe Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden works as the break within an afternoon following eastern Shinjuku through a daimyo garden remade for the imperial household, a temple bound to the old Naito-Shinjuku post town and a collection preserving centuries of Tokyo firefighting.
Begin at Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, where Tokugawa Ieyasu granted 70 hectares to the Naito family in 1590 before the estate passed through an agricultural experiment station and imperial botanical garden; horticulturist Hayato Fukuba commissioned French specialist Henri Martinet to redesign the grounds in 1900, with the new imperial garden completed in 1906 and opened as a national garden in 1949. Continue to Taisoji Temple, descended from the hermitage established by the monk Taiso around 1596 and adopted as the Naito family burial temple after Masakatsu Naito died in 1629, with surviving cultural properties including one of Edo's Six Jizo statues, an Enma figure, Datsueba and the Naito family graves. Conclude at Fire Museum, opened by Tokyo Fire Department on December 3, 1992 and now holding more than 12,000 firefighting objects, books and archival materials spanning Edo-period woodblock prints and equipment through modern pumps, protective clothing and emergency machinery. The progression moves from the Naito estate through the post town that inherited the family name into three centuries of urban firefighting before Saint Marc Cafe Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden brings the route back toward the garden gates for coffee and something warm from the oven.
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