Kyoto Gion Anon Kyoto Gion Main Store

Located along the alley of Gion, where old Kyoto townhouses are scattered, this sweet shop specializes in sweet bean paste desserts. The store is operated by "Sazae Shokuhin", famous for their ohagi (sweet rice ball coated with sweetened red beans) made with Hokkaido Tokachi azuki beans, known as the "red diamond". Centered on their long-established technique of making sweet bean paste, they offer a wide variety of sweets with a "new flavor" that is not bound by Japanese and Western frameworks.

They offer innovative sweets with a Western touch to the sweet bean paste, such as "Anmacaron", a colorful sweet bean paste sandwiched in French meringue macarons, and "Aneclaire", choux pastry with sablé and sweet bean paste with fresh cream. Among them, the most popular is "Anpone", a monaka (Japanese sweet with bean jam filling sandwiched between two thin crisp wafers) where you sandwich your own homemade mascarpone cream and sweet bean paste. Fill the crispy and fragrant shell with your preferred amount of sweet bean paste and cream.

The name of the store is made up of three Japanese characters: "あ" the first character in hiragana, "ん" the last, and "の", the 25th character in the middle. These three characters are put together with the wish to cherish the connection between people through "anko" (sweet bean paste), in the same way that the fifty hiragana characters are connected.