WA Bakery

WA Bakery is a small, independent Japanese patisserie on New Row, the pedestrian street that runs from St Martin's Lane towards the Covent Garden Piazza. Its Japanese bakers and patissiers produce a range of quintessentially Japanese breads and pastries on the premises every day, which makes it one of the few places in the district where the baking is Japanese in style rather than French or British.

The business, WA Cafe and Patisserie, began in Ealing Broadway and now runs four London shops: Ealing, Covent Garden, Marylebone and Aldgate East. Each site bakes on the spot, and the company offers pre-orders, celebration cakes and gift cards alongside the daily counter, with its full range of pastries, cakes and signature items available for collection.

Japanese bakery in Covent Garden, from matcha cake to bear buns

The counter mixes soft, milky breads with precise patisserie. Look for matcha cakes, both as a glossy individual slice and a larger square finished with piped cream, fluffy cream buns shaped like bears with chocolate-chip faces, laminated croissant triangles, and seasonal pieces such as snow skin mooncakes. Drinks run to coffee, green tea and sparkling fruit teas, and most of it is designed to travel well, so the shop works as a takeaway stop on the way to a show.

What to expect on a visit

Expect a compact shop with a handful of seats and a queue of regulars in the late afternoon. It opens from 11am to 8pm every day of the week, bank holidays included, with last orders at 7.45pm. It is one of the more unusual bakeries in Covent Garden, and if you are working through the district's patisserie, Pierre Hermé on Monmouth Street offers the French counterpart a short walk north through Seven Dials.