Tucked away in the quiet suburbs of Setagaya, west of Tokyo, lies a cute one-of-a-kind bakery that specializes in Totoro cream puffs, popular from the animated film, My Neighbor Totoro. Shiro-Hige’s Cream Puff Factory is owned by the sister-in-law of the founder/director of Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki. It’s the only café that has the licensed rights to make these adorable Totoro-themed desserts.
The café is around a 5-minute walk from the Setagaya-Daita station. You’ll start to see signs of Tolo Coffee & Bakery, which is the café upstairs of Shiro-Hige’s. The totoro cream puffs are actually made downstairs and only available for take-outs, but if you want a place to sit down and enjoy the cream puffs, you’ll have to dine-in at Tolo on the 2nd floor.
The bakery itself is a tiny space decked with endless Studio Ghibli decorations to look at, ranging from original sketches from Studio Ghibli, paintings and this sleepy Totoro stuffed animal. Other than their famous cream puffs, they also sell Totoro cookies in cute little gift packages towards the left hand side of the store. The cream puffs are offered in four different flavors: custard & chocolate are the regular flavors offered all year long, and other seasonal flavors based on the time of year. Each flavors are also adorably decorated with different accessories!
There could be a queue for the café for those wishing to dine-in and their website does stress for visitors to reserve cream puffs ahead of time as they’re pretty high in demand and do tend to sell out. We went on a Thursday around 2pm without a reservation and luckily, we only had to wait 10 minutes for a table. All the flavors were also still available. We decided to try the chocolate flavor since we tried a custard flavored cream puff from another bakery just recently. If you do choose to dine-in at the café, just be aware that it is mandatory to order one drink per person.
Being a big fan of Studio Ghibli and growing up watching My Neighbor Totoro on replay, I was immediately filled with excitement when the little Totoro-shaped cream puff was brought to our table. We spent the entire time snapping photos away and even took the dessert away to snap more photos outside of the café for a change in scenery (or maybe I just didn’t have the heart to eat the poor little guy).
When we were finally done and satisfied with the extensive amount of photos we took, it was time to try the cream puff out. I normally don’t have high expectations for Instagram-friendly food, but to my amazement I was surprised by how delightful the cream puff was. Compared to other Japanese cream puffs like Beard Papa, the shell itself was much crunchier and firmer than usual, probably to prevent the crust from getting soggy from the filling. We were really surprised by the chocolate cream filling as it was light, airy and not overly sweet. It almost broke my heart when Bear took the first bite of Mister Totoro’s ears, but it just had to be done!
Bear & Bunny’s Overall review: Worth visiting once, but would not visit again
There are plenty of bakeries within the city center of Tokyo that serve great quality cream puffs that just doesn’t justify going out of the way solely for the food. With that said, if you’re a big Studio Ghibli/ Totoro fan, Shiro-Hige’s is definitely worth visiting at least once. It was fun to immense ourselves into the little neighborhood of the beloved animated creature of Totoro. It felt like revisiting my childhood again and brought back a nice nostalgic feeling of being the carefree young child that just adored the fluffy big creature that guided Mei safely out of the forest.
