Boulangerie Asanoya in Ikebukuro Station

So where to eat if you are in Japan and you don't want to spend a lot of money? Hopefully your local konbini will have a decent selection of fruit, salads and more. I was lucky in that the FamilyMart by my second hotel was just that. So I enjoyed a number of salads and the like for most of my meals. But it is hard to pass up on Japanese pastry. I also tried a couple shops in Ikebukuro Station and my favorite was Boulangerie Asanoya. 

Besides having nice staff, Asanoya also had a lot of temptations. I tried to be reasonable since some were for dinner. Like this cheese bread. 

Or how about pizza bread. 

While this might look like a curry bun. 

It's actually Asanoya's tomato cheese donut. I don't usually post photos of torn apart food, but I had to show the little tomato hiding in there. 

Egg sandwich for lunch one day. The nice big piece of tomato, cucumbers and generous lettuce was good. Often Japanese sandwiches aren't so produce forward.

Since it was sakura season, many places had sakura specials. This sakura bagel wasn't my favorite. That's a salted sakura blossom on top. I've had sakura blossoms before but this time it was too salty all in one place on the bagel. 

What I did like, and I'm sorry I don't have a better photo of it, is their blueberry bagels. I love blueberries and this had a nice amount of them in it. The bagel wasn't heavy like some can be, but was nicely soft.

The other item I ended up getting more of was their little pies. Apple and blueberry, they are very small, maybe a couple inches across. Maybe five centimeters? Next time I will do a size comparison photo. What was nice is they are not overly sweet and the fruit inside is dry, more of a crumble mixture. Apple pie in Japan is not the same as American apple pie. These little ones were good and I liked this size with tea. One was just right. 

And of course I tried the curry donut. Not bad.

Boulangerie Asanoya has been baking in Japan for 85 years. I hope they will be around a lot longer than that because I enjoyed their baked goods. They have a number of locations in Japan, listed here on their webpage (which is in Japanese) http://www.b-asanoya.com/#page5. One thing, in Ikebukuro there is a soba shop also called Asanoya, so if you ever are in that area, they are two different places.