Mille Mele is a specialty apple pie shop located in Asakusa, Tōkyō. The store claims to offer the “world’s best apple pie”, developed by a pastry chef who trained under the renowned Italian master Marco Paolo Molinari.
The shop’s name, Mille Mele, translates to “1,000 apples” in Italian—a reference not to the quantity of fruit, but to the mille-feuille pastry technique used in the pie’s construction. The pastry is folded into more than 1,000 layers, which expand when baked, resulting in an exceptionally crisp and flaky texture. The pie features a butter-rich puff pastry made with fermented French butter, filled with roughly chopped, slow-cooked Fuji apples, and a custard cream produced from soy milk cheese fermented with lactic acid bacteria.
Each pie measured approximately 12 cm in length and was served at room temperature. Despite this, the pastry retained excellent structural integrity and crispness, delivering a rich, aromatic butteriness with a subtle underlying sweetness. The custard cream was smooth and fragrant, with a noticeable vanilla note and a mild tang reminiscent of soy-based yoghurt, which added depth and contrast to the sweetness. The apple filling, cut into generous chunks, retained a pleasing bite and offered a balanced tartness that paired well with the custard and pastry.
Altogether, the pie delivered a satisfying balance of texture and flavour—flaky, creamy, sweet, and tangy in succession. It compared favourably with, and in some respects exceeded, several apple pies sampled in Hirosaki, the apple-growing capital of Japan in Aomori Prefecture.
Mille Mele is located on Shin-Nakamise Shopping Street, 1 Chome-30-2 Asakusa, Taitō City, Tōkyō 111-0032, Japan.