At 7.55am on a recent Friday, I found myself furiously refreshing the website of Ginza Nishikawa, a Japanese bakery in Los Angeles. The reason? A limited quantity of the bakery’s famous Japanese milk bread was going on sale at 8am sharp.
At $18 a loaf, the bread – known as shokupan – doesn’t come cheap. But that hasn’t stopped it selling out within seconds.
On review sites, Los Angeles foodies have proclaimed Ginza Nishikawa’s shokupan “spectacular”, “sublime”,, even “a gastronomic orgasm”, while others say that the effort it took them to obtain a loaf verged on the absurd.
It’s like “trying to get really in-demand concert tickets”, said Noriko Okubo, the co-owner of Ginza Nishikawa, the first US outpost of a Japanese bread company. “Yesterday, it was gone in one minute.”
Shokupan, famed for its dense-yet-fluffy texture, is a familiar comfort food in Japan. But its international popularity has surged in recent years, spawning new bakeries, as well as restaurants serving picture-perfect shokupan sandwiches, across the US.
Ginza Nishikawa opened in Santa Monica this summer. It offers a single product, its $18 bread, and customers have told Okubo they have driven from as far as San Francisco and San Diego to get it. The milk bread is popular enough that scalpers have been reselling the loaves on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu for $22 to $33, Eater Los Angeles reported, prompting complaints from other customers, who say paying $18 should be enough.
Okubu said her decision to bring Ginza Nishikawa to California was inspired by seeing a white bread gap in the US market. Offerings have long been dominated by cheap supermarket brands, even as Americans have embraced homemade sourdough and other artisan breads. “Having eaten Wonder Bread as a child, I just knew the level of the white bread is not very high in the US,” Okubu said.
‘We’re on the verge of a sando boom’
Eighteen dollars might sound like a lot for bread, but in Los Angeles, where vegan sourdough regularly sells for $18 and a loaf of gluten-free brioche can cost $24, Okubo says the cost of Ginza Nishikawa’s bread is justified by the price of its luxury ingredients.
The flour is made from Canadian wheat that is milled in Japan and then re-imported to North America. The water is alkaline. Local workers receive remote guidance from the company’s expert bakers in Japan, and they produce just 200 loaves a day. Each loaf is carefully nestled in its own sturdy gift bag, to prevent the bread from being squished.
Annie Sheng, an anthropologist whose research focuses on Asian bread, said that what makes shokupan distinctive is “the texture and the mouthfeel when you first bite into it, and the sweetness”.
In Japan, she said, bread connoisseurs use the onomatopoeic term “fuwa fuwa” to talk about a texture that’s “fluffy and like a cloud”.
An appreciation of bread with “that really fluffy, chewy mouthfeel is something that people say comes from rice-eating habits”, Sheng said, and bread in Japan is also seen as a “canvas for expression”, with enthusiasts embracing trends such as making beautiful, meticulously constructed fruit sandwiches.
While bread was once considered a western food in Japan, bread-making has now become part of the Japanese national identity, Sheng found, to such an extent that it’s not surprising to see Japanese companies marketing shokupan back to Americans as a distinctively Japanese food. Researchers found that families in Japan started spending more of their food budget on bread than rice in 2011.
In the US, Japanese milk bread is showing up on menus up and down the west coast, from Portland to the Bay Area to Los Angeles, where in 2019 Bon Appétit named Konbi, a sando shop famous for its egg salad sandwiches, as one of the best new restaurants of the year. Okubo believes it is Japanese sandwiches made with milk bread, not the bread alone, that are a rising trend in the US.
“We had the sushi boom, the ramen boom, and now it feels like we’re on the verge of the sando boom,” she said.
More dedicated milk bread outlets may be coming soon to the US and Europe. Ginza Nishikawa is opening its first bakery in China in December, and Okubo said she had an eye on the European market.
We put the $18 loaf to the test
My first attempt to buy Ginza Nishikawa’s bread left me high and dry. Despite entering my credit card details in a frenzy, I was informed, at 8:01am, that the bread had sold out for the day.
This scarcity has only increased the bread’s appeal. “Heard that purchasing bread from this place was as difficult as obtaining Taylor Swift concert tickets,” one reviewer wrote on Yelp. “Challenge accepted.”
A few weeks later I finally secured three loaves, and decided to enlist the help of friends and fellow journalists to test whether the long wait, and two-hour round trip drive to Santa Monica, had been worth it.
The first friend I had sample the shokupan was a dedicated home baker who has her own carefully tended sourdough starter. She was impressed. “[Tastes] like challah and angel food cake had a passionate but very high-class relationship in a five-star hotel,” she texted me. “With champagne. Nothing tawdry.”
But I had told my friend the loaf cost $18 and worried that might be influencing her review. The only way to know for sure whether the bread was worth it was a rigorous taste test pitting Ginza Nishikawa’s loaf against four cheaper varieties of shokupan, as well as a loaf of Wonder Bread.
I got some blindfolds, recruited two fellow Guardian journalists, and the three of us tried all six loaves, scoring each on a scale of one to 10.
I will be honest: we wanted to fall in love with a $6 local bakery loaf. We wanted Wonder Bread to be delicious. But when we tallied up the scores and revealed the winner, the $18 bread dominated – receiving an average score of 8.3 out of 10.
The runner-up was Pasco, a grocery store loaf imported from Japan. Wonder Bread, I am sorry to say, scored 3.3.
The taste test over, we kept devouring more slices of the $18 bread, struggling to articulate what made it so alluring. There was something reminiscent of the starchy whiteness of luxury hotel sheets. “Moist”, “wow”, and “tastes like cake” were some of the testers’ words. “I have ascended into the sweet pillowy hereafter,” my baker friend wrote.
I continued to enjoy the loaf throughout the week, drizzling a slice each morning with condensed milk or spreading it delicately with butter. When the loaf was gone, though, I did not buy another. One of the taste testers put it best: “Worth $18, but not worth driving across LA.”
Matt Cantor and Dani Anguiano contributed reporting
