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| - Not sure why just west of Yonge & Dundas is becoming Toronto's 'hypebeast Asia-town'. In the area, there are line-ups for ramen, bubble tea, matcha, and Japanese cheese cake/tarts as a lot of global Asian brands are opening locations here -- and Asian kids just love lining up for trendy Asian food. These businesses are completely sustained by IG-'foodies'.
Anyways, I don't know too much about Pablo - other than it being a Japanese chain that specializes in cheesetarts. I didn't really have interest, but the lady wanted to try it out and there were no lineups.
We got a full size cheese tart for around $15 and it was about 8". The texture of the filling is similar to flan or pudding - taste was very light (not eggy or cheesy at all). Most of the flavour comes from the apricot topping. The crust was pretty flaky. Neither of us will try it again - just not a great value proposition (their 'premium' cheese tart is the same size but $25 with a creme brulee topping).
Although not the same, Uncle Tetsu is probably their nearest competitor (geographically and figuratively). I'm not a huge fan of sweets, so I do prefer the more subtle taste and better texture of Tetsu's 'cheesecake' (which I probably won't have again anytime soon either). However, with Tetsu, it's hard to find a good substitute -- with Pablo, I rather have a good Chinese egg tart or a Portuguese egg tart... and I won't have to pay $15 - $25 for either.
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