とても美味しかったキャロットケーキ : Ralph's Coffee

For me, who enjoys horse racing, I have a dilemma that I don't have time to go out to eat because there are almost all horse races on my days off. Well, I try to look at it positively as a problem because I have many hobbies, but in that sense, there are a few days off a year when the central horse race is not held, and that day is a day when I can concentrate on eating and walking. Especially during the year-end and New Year holidays, there are several days off without central horse racing between the Hopeful Stakes at the end of the year (last year held on Thursday, December 28) and the New Year's Gold Cup (this year = Saturday, January 6 in 2024), so it is a valuable opportunity. This day was also such a precious day, so I decided to go out to Yokohama to watch the Hakone Ekiden and look at the bargains. For lunch, I enjoyed a very high-quality duck Namba at "[A:14030444, Kyoto Hakkian Yokohama Takashimaya Store]" on the 8th floor of Yokohama Takashimaya, but being able to take a relaxing coffee break after lunch is one of the pleasures of a holiday without horse racing, so I decided to take a break at this café where I had been BM for a long time after lunch on this day. Our shop = Ralph's Coffee is a café developed by Ralph Lauren, and Japan opened its first store in Omotesando in November 2018, a little more than 5 years ago ([A: 13227420, Ralph's Coffee Omotesando]). Currently, we have a total of 6 restaurant stores in major cities in Japan (Omotesando and our store, as well as [a:23075341, Layered Hisaya Odori Park], [a:26032693, Kyoto BAL], [a:27135638, Osaka Kadoma store], [a:13252876, Ralph's Coffee SHINJUKU]). Our shop is located in NEWoMan Yokohama, but "NEWoMan" is a new type of commercial facility developed by Lumine Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of JR East Japan. As it is also called "adult lumine", it is characterized by the fact that the main target is narrowed down to the elderly female group compared to regular lumine. In other words, it is a facility that focuses on "women who are of the age that can be called luminate graduates, who have a lot of shopping experience, and who want something different from others." Therefore, in addition to the spacious structure of the facility, the shops that are located in the building are selected with a higher degree of commitment, and the layout of the restaurant is not divided into floors, such as fashion and lifestyle goods on the lower floors and food and beverage on the upper floors, as in conventional commercial facilities. For example, on the first floor, there is a Chocolate shop "[A: 14079746, Maison Cacao]" and a popular café "[A: 14079765, Blue Bottle Coffee]", but there are also fashion goods, overseas natural cosmetics shops, and fashion brands, so you don't have to go all over the facility. We can see that customers with certain needs are conscious of the restaurant arrangement that seems to be satisfied only on this first floor. NEWoMan Yokohama opened in June 2020 as the second store following NEWoMan Shinjuku, which opened in March 2016, and our store opened at the same time. NEWoman Yokohama is located in the JR Yokohama Tower, a redevelopment building in the west exit area of Yokohama Station, along with CIAL Yokohama and T-Joy Yokohama, which are also commercial facilities, and our shop is located on the 4th floor. If you take the escalator from the Yokohama Station concourse to the 4th floor of NEWoMan Yokohama, you will find our shop attached to the Polo Ralph Lauren shop at the far end (north side). The restaurant stands out for its so-called Ralph Lauren-like interior design based on greenery, and there is an eat-in space for about 18 seats along the escalator. Our restaurant is a semi-self-service style restaurant, and if you want to eat in, you will first secure a seat, and then order and pay at the order counter. After that, if you wait at your seat, the staff will bring you products (you can leave the tableware as it is when you leave the store). The menu is available at the order counter and consists of drinks, Chocolate and pastries. For the order, I chose the Old Fashioned Carrot Cake @ 990 yen from the pastries displayed next to the cash register, and the drink was Ralph's Coffee. The drink is priced at +385 yen as a set discount, so it will be 1,375 yen. It's not cheap by any means (especially the price of pastries), but it's nice to know that the drink discount is relatively affordable. After about 2 minutes of waiting, the order was delivered. Old Fashioned Carrot Cake is a sponge cake kneaded with carrots wrapped in plenty of milk cream, and it has a very rich taste, but it has a mellow sweetness and is very delicious. It goes perfectly with coffee. The coffee is poured generously into a large mug, but it is quite rich and fragrant. I neglected it because it is not a specialty store, but it was more delicious than I expected. In terms of product power, I felt that Ralph Lauren was a place where the idea of not opening a café at a half-baked level could be seen through. At the moment Japan there are still six stores in Japan, two in Tokyo, and restaurant one each in Yokohama, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Osaka, but since we are basically opening stores in large commercial facilities, there may be a possibility of opening multiple stores in one city like Tokyo in the future, as long as it does not become cannibalical. However, since it is basically a Polo Ralph Lauren shop attached to it, it seems to be related to the store opening strategy of the main body, and there may be aspects that cannot be simply decided, and there are aspects that are difficult to predict.