Pâtisserie Sadaharu AOKI Paris 青木定治 (Bellavita location at Taipei) - Matcha Pastries

Address: 台北市松仁路28號(BELLAVITA購物中心 B2) Also see website. (France (Paris), Japan (Tokyo) & Taiwan (Taipei))

Website: http://www.sadaharuaoki.com/

Green Green Green! If you know me well enough, you may already known that I absolutely LOVE everything with green tea.
And of course one of the best quality of all kinds is the Japanese matcha. The matcha flavor is so much stronger than ordinary green tea and the green color is also more intense and pretty. There's something about the bitter sweetness that I love about matcha pastries and it is also a brilliant fusion combination of the East and the West in both flavors and techniques.

Sadaharu Aoki is another great French trained Japanese pastry chef that I am so eager to try his creations other than Toshi Yoroizuka, who's dessert salon made me pay 2 visits during my short 4 day trip to Tokyo in winter 2010. I adore how delicate the French pastries are and I just can't get enough of them.

Again, this time I am back to Taiwan for only 2 weeks and for the most of my time there, I could not eat real food due to my painful wisdom teeth surgery ( the most effective way to loose weight, but super painful) and I just can't miss this opportunity to go to Pâtisserie Sadaharu AOKI Paris just opened not long ago at Bellavita department store in Taipei. Since my time was so limited, I had to move fast. So I tried all of their matcha related pastries I saw in 2 days. Oh man! I am so proud of myself!!! BUT there are actually a bit more than what I've tried. (DARN!!! I'll have to go to Paris!)

Anyway, you can see that they packed your pastries with care. They will not be touching each other and there won't be empty room in the carry out box that may potential cause the pastries to collapse. Okay, let's go to the sweet part. During my 1st visit, I was a bit timid since everything is a bit pricer than other pasty places. So, I went home with 2 items only. I picked matcha macaron and matcha millie feuille.

matcha macaron:

Oh boy! Isn't that cute! This is really good! Not too sweet (like a lot of other places) and that made me finished it in 2 mins. FYI, I didn't even have tea to go with it, but it was fine.

If you love Matcha and Macarons, you should definitely try this one.

matcha millie feuille:

(Oh, please pretend that you didn't see the shadow...)

It's tall and dense. I always end up ordering millie feuille when I couldn't make up my mind. I am a big fan of the buttery flaky layers, however, the filling between the layers is also really important.

Here you can see that I dug out a bit matcha custard for you.  I absolutely LOVE this one. Not just that I am a big fan of good millie feuille in general, but I could really tasted the matcha in it. Although I did see some semi negative reviews about this that the quality isn't that good compare to the Paris stores based on that it fell apart when people started to eat it after the flip the millie feuille sideways, but it didn't happen to me. (Perhaps I was lucky) I finished the whole thing at 6:00AM by myself with coffee! Maybe I have some serious sweet tooth but I didn't think it was too sweet (another complaint that I saw from other reviews.).

For my second visit, I went for 3 other kinds that were available at the place. 

bamboo: it's like a matcha opera cake.

Bamboo is a very famous item. It's layered with matcha cake, matcha paste and chocolate. As much as I was very excited to try it, it was my LEAST favorite one. It was too sweet for me. (WHAT!) And because of it, I find it hard to enjoy the delicate matcha flavor. I am not sure if I'll even give this a second chance. (Maybe only when someone else buy it, then I'll try another bite.)

matcha  éclair:

I can't believe that my sister said that this looks like a cucumber!!! Although she said that it looked weird, I'm sure she loved it since she was eating it with her hands and finished more than half very quickly. (She can't finished it all since my mom and I were also in line to taste it.)

You can see that it's FULL of the matcha custard. Even though I do love the flavor a lot, the éclair's shell wasn't that crunchy anymore. Maybe because I waited too long to taste it? Hum...I don't even remember when was the last time I had an amazing  éclair. (any places recommend? anyone?) So this one is okay and may deserve a second chance. If you are a huge fan of custard, you should still give it a try.

matcha & azuki bean chiboust:

Chiboust is a type of traditional French pudding. From what I think, the texture is almost like a very very rich mousse cake. Sadaharu Aoki presents 1:1 ratio rich matcha chiboust and azuki bean (asian red bean) filling that filled in a crunchy crust box. The top of chiboust has a very thin layer of caramel, which gives a little bit of the wonderful burned sugar taste and makes the flavor more complex BUT everything works really well together.

I really LOVE this one and will recommend this to everyone, especially if you are a big matcha and azuki fan.

By the way, I also bought a jar of "confiture au lait matcha"--matcha au lait spread (like jam but not so much like jam). And I carried it all the way to the US with me so that at least I'll have something handy when I am craving matcha dessert.

YEAH for the EAST plus the WEST!!! I'll have to take RCSIII there. Or maybe we can just go to Paris together so that I can try more things here and other famous French pastry shops.