Fellow OC food bloggers Julian Hsu and Melissa clued me in to a recent development in Old Town Tustin. Japonaise Bakery N Cafe, which was what beloved hole-in-the-wall bakery Cream Pan expanded and grew up into February of last year, has now folded, ceding its space to a planned noodle shop (which is actually good news, in my opinion).
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But back to what happened to the relatively short-lived Japonaise, which took the Cream Pan's bakery items and added pasta, coffee and egg breakfasts to the mix. If I may play the restaurant business analyst for a second: it seems that when Cream Pan itself broke away from Japonaise to its own shop in the same building earlier this year, that was the beginning of the end of Japonaise.
It was easy to notice: customers who previously came into Japonaise to get the pastries rarely stayed for the other things, like breakfast. And when Cream Pan reopened next door, these people simply just went straight to the source for their baked goods. I know this because from that point on, I stopped going to Japonaise myself. All I needed I got at Cream Pan.
Now, if they served noodle soup all along, it'd be a different story.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.