Ginza Sembikiya Fruit Parlour: Eating Upstairs from the Fruit Shop

On the corner of Ginza 5-chome, on the main street, there is a shop whose ground floor is a fruit seller. Peaches and melons sit in the display case one by one, each treated like an object rather than a commodity. That is Ginza Sembikiya.

Go up one floor and you reach its fruit parlour. I spent a late morning there in May 2025.

A fruit shop with a parlour on top

Sembikiya was founded as a fruit specialist in 1894. The parlour upstairs opened in 1913. For more than a century the same house has sold fruit downstairs and served it upstairs.

That structure — buy the fruit on one floor, eat it on the floor above — is, I think, the real luxury here. The buyer choosing the fruit and the kitchen serving it are separated by a single staircase.

The room was quieter than I expected for central Ginza in the middle of the day. There is real space between the tables.

A tall glass of red, white and chocolate

This arrived first.

At the bottom of the narrow glass, deep red sauce and fruit. Above it, a layer of white cream. On top, a single round scoop of chocolate ice cream, with pieces of orange-coloured fruit pushing through between the layers.

A parfait is not meant to be eaten from the top down. Push the spoon straight to the bottom and lift all the layers at once: cold ice cream, soft cream, and the sharp fruit and sauce underneath. Together they stop the whole thing from being merely sweet.

In a fruit shop’s parfait, the fruit is the lead. The cream and the ice cream are there to hold it up, not to cover it.

And then a sandwich

A fruit parlour sounds like a place that only serves sweet things. It is not — there is a proper savoury menu, and this came out on a large white plate.

Toasted bread cut into triangles, filled with thin slices of pink beef, lettuce and tomato. A sprig of parsley standing in the middle, a whole gherkin laid alongside. The plating belongs to an older kind of hotel dining room, and it suits the place.

Eating something salty before the sweet course is what lets you finish the parfait properly. That is the reason to order from the food menu in a fruit parlour, and most visitors skip it.

Green and orange, in tall glasses

Two tall glasses arrived: green and orange. Melon and citrus. Both are the colour the fruit actually is — nothing has been dialled up.

Behind them, another parfait, red, with a strawberry set on the cream.

This moment — when the colours line up on the table — is the most enjoyable thing about a fruit parlour. Because every colour comes from fruit, the table can be as bright as it likes without ever looking garish.

Practical notes

• Visited: May 2025, a weekday late morning.
• Venue: Ginza Sembikiya, Ginza Main Store — Fruit Parlour. 5-5-1 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo. Fruit shop on the ground floor, parlour on the 2nd floor.
• Access: right by Exit B5 of Ginza Station (Tokyo Metro); about 5 minutes on foot from JR Yurakucho Station, Ginza exit.
• Hours: weekdays 11:00–18:00 (L.O. 17:30); Saturdays 11:00–19:00 (L.O. 18:30). Open daily. Check the official site for current hours.
• History: founded as a fruit specialist in 1894; the parlour opened in 1913.
• Signature: the “Ginza Parfait”, built on seasonal cut fruit. Seasonal parfaits rotate through the year.
• How to order: do not order only sweet things. Put one savoury plate in the middle and the meal holds together.
• Before you leave: look at the fruit counter downstairs. It shows you where what you just ate came from.

Ginza has several historic parlours — Shiseido Parlour among them. The reason to choose Sembikiya’s main store is simply that it is a parlour run by a fruit merchant. It is not a dessert shop. It is a fruit shop, and everything follows from that.

Note: the photographs in this article are our own photographs, rendered in an illustrated style. Colours of the food and the room may differ from reality.