Cafe FREUNDLIEB Honten

Bread first, cake second

The counter runs on German baking habits rather than French ones, which changes what is worth ordering. Bread sits at the centre, most obviously in the sandwiches built on house-baked loaves, and the sweet side runs to cakes, seasonal parfaits and cream buns rather than a long viennoiserie case. Read Cafe FREUNDLIEB Honten as a bakery café: a case of bread and bakery items with a cake shop attached, not a restaurant with dessert bolted on.

A café inside a former church

The setting carries much of the identity. The café occupies a historic church in Kobe, and the room does the work that decoration would otherwise have to do, giving an ordinary bakery order the scale and quiet of the building around it. It suits a slower visit than a takeaway counter would: a cake or a parfait at a table, or a sandwich when the visit needs to be more substantial than a sweet. The German-influenced baking and the church shell are the two things that make the place specific, and they pull in the same direction.

Order the cream bun

Start with the cream bun. It gives the bakery side in a single order, bread and cream and an everyday sweet that needs no plated frame. If the point is lunch, take one of the sandwiches on house-baked bread instead, which is where the German bakery programme becomes filling. For a longer sit, a slice of cake or a seasonal parfait keeps the visit in cake-shop territory. The short version: bread when hungry, cream bun when undecided, cake or parfait when the visit is meant to revolve around dessert.