カフェ ラ・ボエム 白金／Cafe La Boheme Shirokane

Went to this place for lunch on a Saturday. The building is interesting and unusual for Tokyo, and the interior does evoke reminiscences of a spacious European-style restaurant or food hall. Arriving at around 11:45 without a reservation, we were quickly seated and were given a choice of sparkling or plain water, a bottle of which was brought to our table. So far, so good.

From the "Holiday Lunch" menu, I chose the "A" set consisting of a salad, main dish (I substituted pasta with a Pizza Margherita), drink (my choice: hot tea) and dessert (I went for Tiramisu). The total cost of this came to ¥2,640. The salad was a pretty standard side salad with a vinaigrette-type of dressing. The pizza arrived a bit too cool, had a very bland taste, was too soggy except on the outer borders, and had the minimum amount of toppings to make it look like a Margherita. The Tiramisu was just cream (which tasked okay) without any ladyfingers or other textural ingredients - the way it was presented, it looked like the top layer of a real Tiramisu had slid on a plate, and was then given an overly generous dusting of cocoa powder. The tea tasted like standard supermarket-grade Lptn tea served with a slice of lemon. All in all, this was quite underwhelming and didn't amount to a satisfactory cost performance.

Lastly, there is the topic mentioned by many other commenters: None of the staff are wearing masks. I can understand that in February 2023 - with mask regulations in Japan to be further relaxed later in the year - you would want to give this a try, and on their website, the company states that they are doing this for the benefit of their staff's health. That is a noble idea - however, where it gets slightly problematic is in two areas: (1) The restaurant not being straightforward to customers about what to expect when entering the restaurant (except for said note which is slightly difficult to find on their website, I did not see any information or announcement about this posted anywhere directly at the shop), and (2) the restaurant ignoring any concerned comments made about the matter by other customers in their reviews.