If you’re looking for a completely spoiler-free review of Eorzea Café in Akihabara, then all you need to know is that 1) there is a required 1,200 yen cover charge that includes one drink and a coaster, 2) the seating lasts for an hour-and-a-half but feels like it will blow by in far less time than that, 3) the food is not good, but is reasonably priced, 4) the drinks are enjoyable to try and range from amazing to just ‘okay’, and 5) the FINAL FANTASY XIV Online restaurant theming is amazing.
If you’re a FINAL FANTASY XIV Online fan, then Eorzea Café is a must-visit stop in Akihabara. You can check out the latest menus online here and make reservations for the Akihabara location here.
If you want to see a spoiler-filled review, then jump to the next paragraph below the photo.
I went to the Akihabara Eorzea Café location in July 2024 as part of my recent trip to Japan, and I booked my reservation 30 days beforehand on the Eorzea Café website. Unlike my prior visit in 2015 which required me to visit a Lawson’s store in Tokyo and navigate a Japanese-only menu to make a reservation (or just show up and hope for a free time slot), this time around the reservation was effortless to make and book in English through Table Check. After clicking through about if I had any food allergies and if I wanted to eat in the café or in an un-themed karaoke room, I was all set for my lunch time seating.
Finding Eorzea Café was fairly easy in Akihabara. The restaurant is just a few minutes’ walk away from the Akihabara metro station, and they smartly have large signs outside that let you know where to enter at and what floor to go to.
When you go up to the correct floor, you’re greeted by a reception area that also has a LOT of FINAL FANTASY XIV Online merchandise for sell that I looked through after checking in for my visit. As you can tell from the pictures, everything there is also available on the different SQUARE ENIX stores. The highlight for me was that it was nice to finally get to smell the different room diffuser scents in person. My favorite? Sharlayan. There is also a spot for taking photos with small signs to hold up and a place where you can write and post small paper notes for your fellow adventurers.
When the reservation started, we were escorted into the Eorzea Café itself. It is a decent sized room with a bar in one corner, TV screens that show game clips on a wall, and tables smartly arranged in the room. Relic weapons from A Realm Reborn adorn the walls (and they were there during my 2015 visit in fact!), and there are copies of the High-Precision Art prints on the walls for sale too. The middle of the restaurant shows off the different Primals and Jobs as stone coasters behind glass, some life-sized Moogle statutes, a FINAL FANTASY XIV Online themed-PC that you can buy, and more. Finally, there is FINAL FANTASY XIV Online music playing nonstop throughout that included everything from A Realm Reborn to Endwalker.
Overall, you could tell that a lot of heart and charm went into designing the Eorzea Café room itself, and it felt genuinely charming. While no one said it outright, this café location is clearly meant to take place in Gridania based upon the backwall design, and it felt like I was really stepping into a place unabashedly meant for FINAL FANTASY XIV Online fans. I was caught off guard by Flow playing midway through my visit, and I found myself catching more small cute details everywhere I looked. All that said, despite being there during the launch of the new expansion, I was a little surprised to not hear any music from Dawntrail despite the restaurant celebrating the expansion’s release.
Photos by author.
When I first sat down at the table, I was given a slip of paper to select my cover-charge included drink and coaster pair. The drink list included one for each job (including Viper and Pictomancer!), a set of drinks themed after the Scions, and a special Dawntrail beverage. There was also your standard sodas and alcohol options. You can also select coasters from the different jobs and Scions.
After placing that paper order, I leafed through the menu. Instead of physical menus like in 2015, it all now takes place on a tablet. The menu had an English language option, and it was easy to navigate through and order from. There are a lot of different drink, food, and dessert options to pick from, and you’re welcome to order as much as you want. There was also staff present who can speak decent English, though it was by no means universal among everyone who was working there.
July 2024 Menu. (Photos by author).
About 10 minutes after we were all seated, what I can only describe as a hypeman took the microphone and held a Cactpot drawing in Japanese after much excitement. Each seat has a number attached to it, and three numbers were drawn. Third prize gets one of a set of mini-tin badges, second place gets a Cactpot-themed mat, and first place gets a HoneyToast dessert. We won the second-place prize, and therefore got the placemat! Additionally, we also got a Dawntrail-themed placemat for attending the café. It was quite cute, to be honest.
While looking through the drink selections, I was struck by how much Eorzea Café clearly focuses on sweetness over anything else. I did not see any options for a spicy, bold flavoring or even a sour/tart focused-drink. Instead, all of the drinks have some type of fruit-based syrup or fruity involvement in them. I am also going to point out here that with each additional order item, we were given an opportunity to select a random sleeved coaster out of a basket.
In celebration of Dawntrail, there were a Golden Passion Soda and a Dawntrail parfait for sale. There is also a Monthly Drink Special based off of the Twelve going on, and I was there in time for Byregot, the Builder’s drink option. Between the two of us, we ordered the Byregot drink, both Dawntrail beverages, and the Pictomancer drink. We considered ordering the Viper beverage, but the three drinks and the parfait was enough sweetness already.
The Pictomancer drink came with three syrups to squeeze into the drink: sakura syrup, bulgar syrup, and passionfruit syrup. The syrups are clearly meant to invoke the Pictomancer painting elements, and the menu encourages you to make your own ‘masterpiece’ by squeezing them into the drink that is a purple haze syrup. I did as instructed before drinking it. I was…not impressed. The drink tasted like a mish-mash of cold super-sweet syrups, and I could not pick out any particular flavor from the four syrups that were now mixed together. That is unfortunate, as I loved the idea behind the drink, but I would never order it again.
The second drink we tried was the Byregot, the Builder beverage. This came with the same purple haze syrup as the Pictomancer, but this time it also had an energy soda and some candy to be added into it on the side. This was surprisingly good. The energy soda was citrusy, and it blended well with the purple haze syrup to add that right amount of sweetness. The candy ‘popped’ in my mouth as I drank, but it did not overpower anything else. There was no taurine bitterness like you’d expect from an energy drink, and I did not feel a ‘jolt’ of energy from the soda itself, which makes me wonder exactly what kind of energy drink they included in it.
Finally, there are the two Dawntrail drinks. The Golden Passion Soda has blue lychee and passion fruit syrups, soda water, champagne gold jelly, and a slice of lemon. This actually was my favorite soda overall. The blue lychee and passionfruit both clearly came through, and the soda helped to cut through the flavors and prevent it from being a sweet mish-mash like the Pictomancer drink. The champagne gold jelly came in small chunks that I kept sucking up through the straw that reminded me more of boba than anything else. Finally, the lemon added just the right amount of citrus flavoring to off balance everything else. I drank most of this in a few moments, realizing what I was doing, and then offered the rest to my partner.
The Dawntrail parfait is not a drink despite being listed in that section. It comes with champagne gold jelly, custard whip, mango fruit, sponge cake, orange sauce, vanilla ice cream, orange slices, white chocolate, French parsley, and a wafer. This parfait was not just ‘good’ in comparison to everything else, but a genuinely good dessert dish in its own right. The sponge cake mixed with the gold jelly, mango, vanilla ice cream, and orange sauce to create something that reminded me exactly of a breaded dreamsicle. It was sweet and creamy, and there was just the right balance of everything for the parfait. That said, the white chocolate and parsley was quite superfluous, and it did not add anything to the overall parfait.
As for food, I ordered the Adventurer’s Taco in honor of G’raha Tia, and my partner ordered the Mabimabi Fish and Chips. Both foods arrived fairly promptly, and we dug in. Unfortunately, the food was the worst part of the entire experience, despite both being a filling meal portion.
The Adventurer’s Taco is a single, plate-sized taco, and was served to me cold. It came with lettuce, taco meat, cheese, salsa, red onion slices, and tortilla chips inside of a flour tortilla. As I ate it with a knife/fork set, I found myself thinking that there was no seasoning added to the taco meat whatsoever. Serving this dish cold was also a baffling decision, as it did not help to cohesively blend the flavors together. Instead, I could taste each food ingredient on its own even while being eaten together. It did not taste bad, don’t get me wrong, it just was extremely bland and mostly flavorless.
The Mabimabi Fish and Chips didn’t fare much better. The chips (‘french fries’, really) were regular cut and crispy, but they tasted unsalted and unseasoned. The fish did taste like fish, but they were fairly lightly battered without any seasoning added to them. The sauces (tonkatsu, tartar, and ketchup) included with them were fairly unremarkable as well. That said, it was a filling meal portion for this dish as well.
Despite my partner’s initial reservations on if we would be able to really spend an hour-and-a-half there, we did. Because we had ordered the parfait and split it, we did not order any additional dessert. Instead, we just hung out and chatted while enjoying the music and decorations. When time was up, we filed out into a line and paid. The checkout process was unremarkably smooth, and while they had a stamp rally going on at the time, we definitely did not order anywhere near enough to warrant us winning anything from it.
Ultimately, I am giving this place a four out of five stars. That is odd, considering the quality of the food at…well…a restaurant. For me, the ultimate question was: Is Eorzea Café worth spending your time at when you’re visiting Japan? For fans of FINAL FANTASY XIV Online, the answer is yes. The process of getting a reservation is simple with multiple time slots during the day, it is simple to get to the café location, and it is painless to order from even if you don’t speak Japanese. The theming is incredibly on point too, and I loved being immersed in a place that is tied to a video game that I adore so much. I just wish the food itself was better, unfortunately. I am guessing this is meant to make sure the place appeals to as many people as possible by making the palette as simple as possible. All that said: my trip to Eorzea Café was easily slotted into my overall time in Akihabara as our lunch meal, and I am personally glad that I did so.
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Have you been to Eorzea Café? What do you think of the food and drink selection there?
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