Moscow news
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14-Mar-2009
The perfect Puff
By Ayano Hodouchi. Beard Papa is a very popular cream puff franchise chain that opened 10 years ago in Osaka, Japan, at the onset of the cream puff craze in that country. It took a decade, but now the ripples of that pebble in the pond have even reached us here in Russia. A few weeks ago, the Japanese pastry chain set up shop in a row of kiosks right outside Kropotkinskaya metro station.
It's not easy to miss it - there's a short row of newly renovated little shops right at the exit/entrance of the metro, and Beard Papa is at the end of it, past a rose shop and a chocolate shop. It's really not much more than a kiosk - inside there's just a tiled floor, a counter, a huge oven, a cream-inserting machine, and a basket of puffy puffs. As customers enter, the staff call out "irasshaimase", a welcome in Japanese.
Choosing is remarkably easy - a plain cream puff (or profiterole, or choux a la creme) for 70 roubles, or a chocolate-covered one for 5 roubles more, both about the size of a small woman's fist. Drinks are almost as simple - tea for 50 roubles, espresso for 60 roubles, and Americano (filter coffee) for 65 roubles. In some countries the selection is wider, including other desserts as well as seasonal cream puffs with such fillings as green tea or pumpkin cream.
A die-hard fan of cream puffs myself, I was, amazingly, not disappointed. The cream was as smooth and thick and custardy as I remembered in Japan, and the pastry, distinctive amongst its kind for being not soft but slightly crunchy and crispy, was done to a turn. The procedure was the same, too - I ordered one, and the shop girl popped a fresh pastry onto the cream-inserting machine, squeezed cream in it, dusted it with powdered sugar and popped it in a paper bag.
Perhaps due to the day being a holiday, the little shop was filled with hungry people coming in incessantly. Some took away boxes of cream puffs (400 roubles for six), most munched away at the counter with a hot drink in a paper cup. Some of the things I cannot find in Russia are good custard cream and not-stale puff pastry, so I considered 70 roubles a fair enough price, but a man standing nearby commented to his girlfriend that it seemed a bit pricey.
Where & When:
Beard Papa: Gogolevsky Bulvar, in the row of kiosks at the Kropotkinskaya metro station / m. Kropotkinskaya / 961 7718 / Mon.-Fri. 8 am to 10 pm, Sat. and Sun. 10 am to 9 pm