Celebrating your Birthday Vampire Style

I like to go to interesting places for special events like birthdays and anniversaries. This year I decided on the vampire café in Ginza. It is situated about 5 minutes on foot from exit number C3 of the Ginza subway station.

The restaurant has a very nice dark atmosphere with lots of skulls, bats, spider nets and fake candles. They have a few larger tables in the centre and some smaller ones that are separated by red curtains that provide some privacy.

Unfortunately for me, someone who likes to photograph her food, the café does not have many lights. If you want to take pictures here, you defiantly need to bring a camera that does well with low light.

I must admit that I even used my iPhone light so I could read the menu better because that was not easy in the dim light.

On the menu, that is designed to look like an old magic book, you can find a variety of appetizers, pizza and pasta dishes, meat and fish dishes and desserts. All are arranged nicely to give them a gothic look and they all have very cool names which, unfortunately, are only in Japanese. The menu has English explanations, but they just explain what the food is and not what it is called. For example, I ordered beef cheeks and they were called “Remains of the executed Van Helsing” in Japanese or the Caprese salad is called “beautiful rose” because it is arranged to look like a rose.

They also have a lot of cool-looking cocktails that come with these fancy ice cubes that glow. I personally can recommend the rose cocktail as it had a really nice rose aroma.

A common issue with these themed cafés in Japan is that the food does not taste very good, but this was not the case here. Everything I tried tasted quite good and my beef was very juicy and soft.

The café is rather on the pricy side, but considering that is situated in Ginza and considering the atmosphere of the place I think the prices are reasonable. Cocktails are around 1,000 yen and food items around 800 to 2,500 yen. You can also get course menus starting at 3,850 yen. For special occasions, you can also order a special cake but as they only have chocolate cake options I went with the regular dessert menu.

For this spider dessert, you can choose from a variety of combinations for the ice cream flavours. 

What I found quite interesting is the waiter. He had a very cool looking vampire-like outfit and also a very vampire-like attitude. He was acting unfriendly on purpose to contribute to the atmosphere. In Japanese restaurants, the waiters and waitresses usually are super friendly so this is exactly the opposite of what you would expect.

If you are looking for a new kind of experience and like gothic vibes you should check out this place.