Tokyo cafe challenges customers to play with their food? Challenge accepted!

Riding the waves and eating the sweets in Asagaya .

It’s been said that you can learn everything you really need to know in life in kindergarten, but that’s obviously oversimplifying things quite a bit.

Adult life presents problems far more complex than the topics handled in a curriculum designed for five-year-olds.

For example, from a young age pretty much everyone gets taught not to play with their food… but what do you do when the people who’re giving you that food not only encourage you to play with it, but outright challenge you to? That’s the philosophical question represented by dessert cafe Tokyo Taiyaki Mania .

There’s a lot of accuracy in that name, as the shop is indeed located in Tokyo (in the Asagaya neighborhood, to be precise), and the staff is passionate about taiyaki , the traditional Japanese desserts of fish-shaped cakes filled with anko (sweet bean paste) or other sweet stuff.

And yet, Tokyo Taiyaki Mania’s name isn’t completely thorough.

It leaves out roughly half of the menu options: the gelato that Tayaki Mania (as we’ll call the place for short) produces in-house, using an ice cream-making machine imported from Italy.

This brings us to another temptation to go against something we were taught as kids: Don’t spoil your appetite by eating too many sweets.

As adults, though, we’ve learned that eating double desserts isn’t “spoiling your appetite” so much as “using your appetite’s full potential in the most joy-inducing way possible,” and thankfully Taiyaki Mania agrees and recommends treating yourself to both a taiyaki and some ice cream at the same time .

In turn, this, leads to the natural compulsion to combine the treats, and once again, Taiyaki Mania isn’t about to try to talk you out of that.

As a matter of fact, the cafe’s website invites customers to take the “naminori (wave-riding) challenge” by balancing their taiyaki atop their swirl of gelato and snapping a photo of the surfing-style sweets .

This was a challenge our taste-testing Japanese-language reporter Yayoi Saginomiya was happy to accept, especially since she’d opted for the photogenic and appropriately colored Blue Ocean flavor of ice cream.

That said, balancing the taiyaki is easier said than done.

The gelato isn’t watery, but it’s still a creamy dessert, so it’ll start to melt if you wait too long.