Ginza Wakamatsu has been in the sweets business for well over 100 years. When the shop first opened in 1894, it sold shiruko, a sweet porridge made with boiled azuki beans and eaten with mochi rice cakes or shiratama rice-flour dumplings. But in 1930 at the beginning of the Showa era (1926-1989), second-generation proprietor Hanjiro Mori combined homemade bean paste with mitsumame (small cubes of agar jelly) to create anmitsu, which soon became one of the shop's best selling sweets.
Thanks to this ingenious combination from Ginza Wakamatsu, anmitsu is now a classic Japanese dessert that you can find all over the country. The dessert is served in a bowl with a mix of anko bean paste, mitsumame and fruit drizzled with kuromitsu (black sugar syrup).
To try this dessert at its birthplace, order the 'original anmitsu'. It comes in different variations including the cream shiratama anmitsu, which has a scoop of vanilla ice cream and shiratama mochi.