Little Darling Coffee Roasters is a gorgeous, Instagrammy place that is somewhat hard to find, and if you’re coming for coffee or food, I don’t recommend you bother. After traipsing through a local park trying to track down the dot on Google Maps, I realized

I had to walk around the block to get into Share Green Minami Aoyama, a very cool adult playground type of spot in an interstitial Tokyo neighborhood, with a vast faded green turf surrounded by buildings, cabanas, park-y areas, some office buildings, and lots of foliage.

Little Darling Coffee Roasters inhabits a giant, hangar-like space on the northern side of Share Green. Given the beautiful space and good design elements, I was excited to try their offerings. Although it was fairly early in the day, I ordered their so-called

Japanese bao sandwich along with my espresso and received a dry mantou containing chewy, overcooked sukiyaki-style beef and a piece of dry tofu – except for a chopped green onion and julienned daikon garnish no other elements were present – and no flavor either. The coffee was seriously over-roasted in the old-school Japanese style, so I gave up on Little Darling entirely, found my way out of Share Green and headed out to Aoyama proper to meet an old friend for lunch.