Food

I’ll Pass on The Japanese Pancakes – Gram Cafe Experience!

October 29, 2023 / 1 Comment

Light and cloudy, beautiful and flavorful? Japanese pancakes, or soufflé pancakes, or even cloud pancakes are these thick-looking, but very light and airy pancakes made from lengthily whipping egg whites. They look amazing, especially with various flavors, and I tried them for the first time at Gram Cafe, along with more of their menu.

Gram Cafe Name

I need to look up the origins of Gram Cafe, as when I hear and think of gram, I think about the bacteria… gram positive bacteria, etc. Not a good image. Anyways, with that aside, let’s get to the food photos and my thoughts and gram cafe experience in the captions!

Mango with sago cloud pancake. A couple cloud pancakes with mango sauce, topped with mango and grapefruit, side of mango, cream, and mango ice cream or sherbet. I thought this would come out later, but it came out first. Super fast! We’re the pancakes premade? I thought they’d be fluffier based on photos. Anyways, I liked everything here but the pancakes. That eggy flavor… definitely not a fan of. A couple bites, and I was done. More cream and mango stuff for me, please.
An espresso tonic-like drink with some cream on top. Mild in flavor, but pretty good. I really liked the cream! Could def had a whole side of that.
I got the matcha latte. Whole milk by default. It was rather milky, but yet again I have trouble tasting matcha unless there was a lot of it. The matcha is pre-sweetened, so sadly, I wasn’t able to taste the true matcha much here.
Strawberry matcha dalgona. The matcha is whipped, similar to the dalgona coffee craze during the earlier parts of the pandemic. The dalgona matcha itself was really good, nice concentrated flavor. Too much milk IMO.
Fried oysters, or kaki fry. Delicious fried oysters… yum. Nicely breaded and fried.
Takoyaki. I love this stuff. These are pretty standard, but missing that slight subtle crunch in the first bite as they were a bit soggy by the time they got to us.
Chicken karaage. Can’t go wrong with a safe bet with some fried chicken!
Eel and rice, with some ikura (salmon roe). I’m not the biggest eel fan, but this dish was my fave that I tried at gram cafe. The eel was sauced to perfection - not overly heavy and not light on the sauce, and it mixed in very well with the rice. The avocado was an interesting touch, along with the salmon roe. Delicious! We could use some seaweed to make mini hand rolls here, but this dish was excellent. Great combo.
Smoked salmon pancakes. Smoked salmon and avocado with regular pancake on the bottom, so sort of a take on tacos. Side of potatoes and salad. Potatoes were good, didn’t try the salad. The smoked salmon was a good amount and the avocado was fresh and added nice texture. The pancake made the item less messy, but I didn’t really enjoy the pancake since its denseness and flavor took away from the smoked salmon.

Gram Cafe Experience Overview

It seems people come to Gram Cafe for the cloud / Japanese / soufflé pancakes, but that was the item I enjoyed the least here. I didn’t like the eggy flavor, but the rest was good. The eel rice plate/bowl surprised me as that ended up being my favorite dish. Their appetizers were great as well. I’d come here again to try more of their menu, and perhaps a different drink since the matcha latte I got was way more milky than I’d liked. Overall, good experience. Glad I was able to enjoy most of the food with a couple friends here. 

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