I’m somewhat late to the game when it comes to the Instagram phenomenon and dessert trend du jour that is the fish-shaped taiyaki ice cream cone. The treat is available at Uji Time Dessert (2575 Telegraph Ave.), a newish Japanese dessert shop in Berkeley that shares a space with the shaved snow shop Vampire Penguin. But if you’ve been thinking about giving it a try, here’s what you need to know:
See also:
How to Eat Dessert All Day in the East Bay
[jump] 1. First off, the line is fairly bananas — a half-hour wait on a recent Saturday afternoon, despite the fact that I arrived just minutes after opening. You can tell which side of the room is occupied by Uji Time (the left) by the long, slow-moving queue that stretches along one wall.
2. A taiyaki is a kind of fish-shaped cake popular in Japan (tai means “sea bream”). The cakes are baked to order in a cast-iron mold, and are often filled with red bean paste. The taiyaki ice cream cones are basically a super-sized version of these cakes, with an opening at the mouth end that gets filled with soft-serve ice cream — quite exceptional soft-serve ice cream, in the case of Uji Time, especially if you opt for the black sesame flavor. The warm, just-baked “cone” has some of the exterior crispness of a waffle cone, but also the softness of pancake. And once you finish all of the ice cream and bite into the body of the fish — surprise! — you’ll discover some of that red bean paste filling inside. In that way, it is like two desserts in one.
Whether it’s worth the wait is up to you to decide.
