SWEETS PARADISE Harajuku — Restaurant in Tokyo

I went to SuiPara for the first time because of the collaboration. Here are my thoughts as a foreigner.

Reservation: The SuiPara App is completely in Japanese. You can navigate using Papago. Convenient way of reserving, but not foreigner friendly.

Staff/Communication: The thing is, since SuiPara likes to collab with popular anime/game series/franchises, you’d expect them to at least give a universal/english guide for foreigners that are attracted to the limited event. But nothing. The staff speak in Japanese only, and there’s not even an english pamphlet to guide the foreigners. It honestly makes me feel sad. The staff weren’t too hospitable either. They can’t explain the rules in detail, and they don’t care about you. You’re on your own, basically.

Ambience: The ambience is nice, simple and clean. Although the collaboration decorations are lacklustre.

Food: The collaboration menu for was not worth the money. The drink was chock full of ice, so it only took me 3 sips to finish the drink. That’s 500 Yen. The food was not good either. 700 Yen for hard pancakes with a crumpled picture of the character wasn’t too appetising. The ice cream is the best part of the buffet. Can never go wrong with Haagen-Darts. The dessert buffet’s taste wasn’t too good, but it has a great variety.

Cost-Performance: So, to get access to the collaboration menu and merchandise, you need to avail the collaboration buffet, which is no surprise. 1490Yen per person is reasonable. However, the collab menu has a different price altogether. If you bought a lot of the collab food, you won’t be able to experience the buffet, since you only have 60-80 minutes. If you want to make your money worth it, you need to eat quickly haha. I find that a bit… Let’s just say it doesn’t feel worth it. Why just let the collab customers buy from the collab menu without buying a buffet stub? Not to mention that the quality of the collab food wasn’t too good either…

All in all, I think the one of the reasons why SuiPara is alive is because of the collaborations. Honestly, as a foreigner, I felt very lost and the staff wasn’t happy to help us either. It’s upsetting. For a shop that attracts foreigners, they don’t give a damn about them; they don’t even bother to at least give them a pamphlet guide. Plus the food isn’t worth the money as well. I think I won’t be coming back unless they improve these...

Terrible service, blend atmosphere, okay food.

I shared a review here 9 months ago, which was my very first visit to a Sweets Paradise store and I was very thrilled. This time, however, I completely changed my mind about this store. Having been to the other branches, I can safely say this is the weakest one.

The food is okay, though it could use a faster replacement in the case of hot dishes.

For collaborations, the space is way to tiny and sloppy.

But what really disappointed me this time around was the service.

I brought my friends to the store and I felt ashamed of how bad our experience was yesterday. The staff was not kind and polite, they treated us like a nuisance, the vibes of "we're closing soon so you're on the way, hurry up and get out already". I'm sorry but I'm paying for an all-you-can-eat course with a time limit for which I had a reservation! If the store intended to close early for the new year, that's completely understandable, but to treat the clients like they're not welcome is unacceptable. If I can eat until my time is up how come you've already put away all the food way before the time's up? Again, I'm paying for this, for every single second of it. If Sweets Paradise Harajuku can't handle to have clients right before closing, simply don't accept reservations for such hours then. And if the staff can't help but start cleaning and organizing, at the very least be polite about it.

I'm not gonna be coming back to this store and I strongly recommend that everyone else who wants to try this restaurant to go to the Ikebukuro or Shinjuku...

I visited on February 11th 2025 for the Persona 5 collaboration and had a bit of a disappointing experience. The hostess that day was noticeably unfriendly toward foreign customers (us) while being warm and welcoming to Japanese guests. Despite the café being less than half full, she was rushing around as if handling a crisis.

In all my years visiting Japan, even when staff couldn’t speak much English, they were always polite, and we could work together using Google Translate. However, this hostess gave us very sparse and unclear instructions, and when we couldn’t understand the process, she responded with exasperation.

When I asked about a collaboration sweater, she angrily slammed her clenched fist on the very tiny "Sold Out" sign, which felt unnecessarily aggressive.

I have been visiting Japan for many years and always follow the country’s unwritten social rules taught to me by my Japanese friends, but today’s experience was disappointing. I thought these situations only happened in horror stories on TikTok, but sadly, this was my first time witnessing it firsthand.

I’m now very unsure about visiting any collaboration café in the future if this is the kind of treatment...