Lunch at the Pokemon Cafe!
Do you love Pokemon so much you want to eat them? Well, now you can! Or close enough. I had lunch at the Pokemon Café in Shinsaibashi, Osaka. Was it worth it? How hard was it to get a reservation? What was the food like? Well, let me tell you my experience.
This was my first trip to Japan and one of the major things I wanted to do was go to the Pokemon Café. I’d spent months staring at the souvenirs on the website, knew the menu back to front and got FoMO after watching so many Youtube videos of people going there that I was not going to miss it. So, I made sure I got a reservation but it was tough. If you are on holidays and have a limited amount of time, I would highly recommend booking but there is another way if you miss out.
Reservations open a month in advance at 6pm Japan time. Being in Australia there’s only an hour difference which made it easier to get in there right on time and confirm a booking but I had to be super quick. After you get past the booking page where you put in your details, you can pre-purchase some “Special Goods.” These include coasters and Pikachu key chains. You’ll get a confirmation email straight away with all the reservation details and a reminder email a couple days before your booking.
Booking a reservation does take out that possibility that you might miss out but there is another way. If you can’t get a reservation you can go to the café and wait for no-shows. There is a board out the front that displays open spots at the café. You can wait in line and if people don’t turn up or call the café within 15 minutes after their scheduled reservation, they lose it which opens it up to the people waiting in line. So, even though the board may say they are all booked up, they might have some last-minute cancellations. But you could be waiting a while. We saw a couple waiting in line as we walked past, went and had a coffee and breakfast, walked past again and they were still waiting in line an hour later.
My tips for booking would be:
- Have the fastest internet connection possible with multiple people attempting a reservation, you can always cancel if more than one of you get through.
- Be ready and waiting a few minutes before 6pm with your contact details ready to go.
- Be flexible with the time, just quickly click one of the open spots and move onto the next page because the reservation isn’t confirmed until you type in your contact details. The bookings have a temporary hold for 15 minutes so if you don’t get it right away at 6pm, wait for 15 minutes to pass to see if the held bookings were not confirmed.
- The Osaka café is easier to get a reservation than the Tokyo café but the Tokyo café has a higher capacity (140 compared to Osaka’s 96 seats) so, you might have a better chance if you don’t have a reservation at the Tokyo café.
So, the day finally came, first day in Japan, battled the Osaka transport system and managed to find our way to the Pokémon Cafe. The café is on the ninth floor of the Daimaru Shinsaibashi department store and as you come up the escalator, you are greeted by the three legendary bird Pokémon, Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres, outside the Pokémon Center Osaka DX.
The store is a wide-open layout and we got there roughly at 11:30am on a Thursday and it was surprisingly quiet. Our reservation wasn’t until 1:50pm so there was a lot of time to check it out, but you will get the Pokémon Center theme song stuck in your head, I guarantee. There are a lot of other cool stores next door at the Parco department store. The sixth floor is all pop culture with stores like Capcom, Godzilla, Lego, and Studio Ghibli. But hook a right from the escalators and there is the Pokémon Café.
Once you are seated, you’re shown the menu on an iPad, and they can change it to English for you if you haven’t finished your Duolingo course yet.
The room is decked out in what I would call Scandi meets modern Pokémon, heavily featuring the newest starters, Fuecoco, Quaxly, and Sprigatito, and of course the OG, Pikachu.
We put our order in and I’d barely finished taking photos of the room and they were bringing our food out. There were three of us so we ordered the three mainstays, the Pikachu Plate, Eevee Plate and Snorlax Lunch Plate. We also got some drinks, a Fuecoco Apple Soda Float, Gengar’s Confuse Ray Smoothie, Oolong tea which came with a Pikachu take-home cup, and a latte with my favourite Pokémon, Growlithe, on top. For dessert, we ordered the Very Chocolate Parfait.
The Pikachu Plate comes with an adorable face smiling up at you that you kinda feel bad when you fork him through his omelette face and eat his rice brains. It has a crispy coated prawn, fried potatoes, which were delicious I could’ve eaten a bowl full of them, a light salad to say you ate healthy, a lightning bolt rissole and some mac and cheese made with Pokémon shapes.
The Eevee plate came with a bread roll face of Eevee with a creamy sauce for its fur and crispy crackers for its ears. Those amazing potatoes were on it again but the rest of the plate was a bit of a let down. The soup was a creamy chowder but it was pretty bland. The salad had tuna with corn which was fine, but I would’ve expected a bit more sweetness from the corn. And the little quiche was more pastry than filling. The Pikachu Plate had more of a variety and the main part of the Eevee Plate was just a bread roll, so it could’ve done with something else, maybe the meat rissole could’ve been used for Eevee’s face. I’m no chef so maybe it wouldn’t work but it definitely needed more.
Snorlax’s Lunch Plate had a sleeping Snorlax with a belly full of fried rice and carrot shaped Z’s on the salad. It also had a moist chicken fillet with a sauce that was a bit teriyaki, and a bit barbeque, whatever it was, it was full of flavour and delicious poured over the chicken. The size was quite generous and out of the three mains we ordered, I would definitely recommend getting it.
With each drink you order, the server will come around with an iPad and you play a mini-game where you win a coaster. It’s a nice little souvenir that won’t take up much luggage space on the flight home. I chose the special Fuecoco Apple Soda Float, we’d call it a spider in Australia. I loved the diced apple that came in it, but they were hard to get to because there were huge chunks of ice. Gengar’s Confuse Ray Smoothie was grape flavoured with little bits of grape and was pretty good too. Just don’t drink it too fast and try to eat the ice cube that makes it light up. Some of us got hit by the confuse ray and thought it was real ice. I love that you can get just about any Pokémon you want as latte art on your coffee and my Growlithe came out really well. There was a lot of foam but it was one of the better coffees I had whilst in Japan. I couldn’t resist the Pikachu cup so I had to get it, along with a nice Oolong tea, and it’s a pretty sturdy cup that did survive the trip home.
To finish up we got the Pokemon Café’s Very Chocolate Parfait. This was the highlight of the meal. Full of berries, ice cream and chocolatey goodness. My favourite part was the chocolatey rice puffs at the bottom mixed with a bit of the melted ice cream.
Orders close with 30 minutes left of your sitting but after eating all that I could not fit anything else in but before we left we had a visit from the yellow fluffball himself, Pikachu. Pikachu comes out and does a little dance which is probably more for the kids but I found watching him try to clap with his tiny arms hilarious.
The Osaka café is only small, so only one person per table can line up to pay. I really wanted to get the Snorlax plate used for the meal but they were all sold out. There were a few other items sold out too but I managed to get a Patissiere Pikachu key chain to take home.
So, was the Pokemon Café worth it? Absolutely. It’s more than just a café, it’s an experience. Whilst not all the food was great, I would go back for the Snorlax Plate and the Very Chocolate Parfait again. The menu does change and there are specials released for different occasions so there is something you can go back to try if you didn’t like what you ordered the first time. It’s a fun, light-hearted atmosphere and something no Pokémon fan would forget, I certainly won’t!
