Ethnic Aikawa (2): La Miel — A Taste of Home at a Peruvian Cake Shop

La Miel de Aikawa

A staff member at Sabor Latino told us about two nearby places. One was a cake shop a little farther south along the road. The other was a Peruvian restaurant located farther down the road after turning left.

The cake shop was called La Miel de Aikawa. “La Miel” means “honey” in Spanish.

We found the shop along the prefectural road. It was not particularly large, but its small parking lot, with space for several cars, was almost full. When we went inside, the place was quite busy as well. There were many families, and there was also a space where customers could eat what they had bought.

Rather than simply being a neighborhood cake shop, it felt like a combination of a grocery store, café, and casual eatery.

Just as at Sabor Latino, the conversations between the staff and all the other customers were in Spanish. We had only been driving around Kanagawa Prefecture, yet this was already the second place in a row where a foreign language sounded more natural than Japanese.

Little by little, we were beginning to see what made Aikawa so interesting.

A Cake Shop That Is More Than a Cake Shop

Food and miscellaneous goods were displayed around the cash register, making part of the shop look almost like a small supermarket.

Still, the cakes were clearly the main attraction.

The display case was filled with puddings, pies, cream cakes, and other sweets.

There was nothing extraordinarily unusual about them. In fact, looked at individually, many could easily have appeared in a Japanese pastry shop. Yet the way they were displayed, their size, and the way cream was used were all slightly different.

They were not completely unfamiliar foods, and yet somehow this did not feel like a Japanese cake shop.

It is these subtle differences that I find interesting.

When you think about it, Western-style sweets such as cakes and puddings are not foods unique to Japan. They spread from Europe to many parts of the world, changing along the way according to local preferences for sweetness, ingredients, and ways of eating.

And here they were, sitting in a display case in Aikawa.

Peru, of course, has its own cakes and sweets that Peruvians have grown up eating since childhood.

Everyday Treats for Peruvians

The shop also sold casual, fast-food-style items in addition to cakes.

It was probably a place where people came not only to buy something sweet, but also to have a light meal or stop by with their families.

Looking around the shop, it hardly felt like somewhere people came to “experience foreign cuisine.” Of course, for us, it was unusual. But for the customers around us, this was not a place to have some special “Peruvian experience.”

It was probably simply an everyday shop where families came to buy cakes or have a snack.

That is one of the things I find so interesting about exploring communities with large foreign populations.

If you eat at a restaurant once, you can learn something about a country’s “cuisine.” But when you visit a supermarket, a bakery, or a cake shop, you begin to see a little more: what people normally buy, what they eat, and how they spend their days off.

Even though we were still in Aikawa, it felt as though we were getting a small glimpse into everyday life in Peru.

Sharing a Mille-Feuille Between the Three of Us

Ideally, I would have liked to try several things.
The pudding looked interesting, and I wanted to try some of the pies as well. But we were planning to visit the Peruvian restaurant that the staff at Sabor Latino had recommended after this. And we had only just eaten a churrasquito and a pastel.
We could hardly eat several cakes here as well.

So we bought just one mille-feuille and shared it between the three of us.
We tried it. It was simply good.

It was not as though it had some extraordinarily unusual flavor just because it was a “Peruvian cake.” But I think that is exactly the point.

For us, it was “Peruvian cake.” For the people who come here regularly, it was probably just the cake they always eat.

Still, perhaps we should have bought the pudding too.

You Cannot Understand a “Foreign Community” Through Restaurants Alone

At Sabor Latino, we had seen South American groceries, meat, drinks, bread, international money-transfer services, and even a church next door.And now we were visiting a cake shop.
When we think of a town where many people from other countries live, it is easy to imagine a place with lots of foreign restaurants. But if people actually live there, restaurants alone are not enough.
They need supermarkets. They need bread and sweets. They need places where families can casually stop by.
And when a birthday comes around, they probably want to eat the cakes they have known and loved for years.

Seen that way, the simple fact that a shop like La Miel operates here as an ordinary part of the neighborhood seems to show how deeply South American life has taken root in Aikawa.
We had visited only two places so far, Sabor Latino and La Miel, but our “Ethnic Aikawa” was already beginning to look like more than somewhere to go from one foreign restaurant to another.
There is an everyday life here — the everyday life of people from other countries who now live in Japan.
So, next we were going to head to the Peruvian restaurant…
Or at least, that was the plan.
Our day exploring Aikawa was about to take us in a completely different direction.