Review: Fujiya Red Bean and Green Tea Parfait Look Chocolate

Review: Look Chocolates
Gifted: July 2011
Best Before: January 2012
Review: October 2011

Another lovely gift from Deb Aoki, it’s Fujiya’s Green Tea Ice Cream Parfait Look Chocolate. Quite a mouthful eh? Well these little chocolates are much smaller than that, a tiny bite each. Honestly this is something I’d never buy for myself, the mix of lfavours, the box of smaller chocolates, the Fujiya brand, none of it does much for me normally, but that’s what makes it such an excellent gift–I get to try something new!

Packaging: The Look Chocolates come in a flip-top box containing 14 individually wrapped chocolate squares. Each square weighs about 4 grams, and has about 23 calories, for those of you keeping track of that sort of thing.

The packaging itself is really excellent (unfortunately it was smooshed a little in the shipping back from San Diego). It features a large, wrap-around image of the flavour it purports to be–a green tea ice cream parfait, drenched with red bean. It also features a product shot of the actual chocolate, and large branding. Even if you can’t read the Japanese, you can still tell what you’re getting. The tear-away lid on the box is also nice, and surprisingly the inside of the box ALSO features printing… a cool green evocative of the green tea. A+, really lovely.

Scent: Almost unscented, which is worrying. Bringing it in close the only scent is of waxy chocolate, with no hint of green tea, red bean, ice cream, or anything else. Even biting it open and smelling the center where the green tea, red bean, and cream are supposed to live smells like nothing except waxy chocolate. Um.

Taste & Texture: Well, that’s a failure. Seriously, I can’t stress enough how little this chocolate has anything at all to do with being a red bean and green tea ice cream parfait. The taste is almost exclusively waxy, standard-issue Fujiya brand chocolate (think cheap halloween chocolate). There’s the barest hint of green tea there, but it’s so weak and muddled that I honestly couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be at first… it’s more like an absence of flavour. The only red bean comes through in the after-taste, as each chocolate has a couple of freeze-dried red beans in the center and if you just eat those, they taste like red bean. Well, freeze-dried red bean, which only tastes like 10% of a red bean.

Verdict: The thing is, this isn’t bad, as a little chocolate confection. It’s just not any good either. It’s utterly inoffensive on its own merits, but a complete failure if it’s trying to be what it purports on the box. I doubt I’d buy them again, but I can’t believe that Fujiya’s Look Chocolates have become this popular tasting this mediocre. It’s actually a little shocking.

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3 Responses to Review: Fujiya Red Bean and Green Tea Parfait Look Chocolate

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