About

The constraints are absolute, and everything interesting happens within them. Noriko Miyazaki did not set out to open a bakery. For eight years she worked as a pastry chef at a French-Japanese restaurant in Kyoto, making tarts and entremets and the occasional brioche. Bread was always the thing she did on her days off, quietly, without much fuss. A long working stay in Alsace in 2016 changed that. She spent three months watching a village baker in Obernai work a 72-hour levain, and she came home with a jar of starter, a notebook, and a different sense of what bread could be. She spent two years baking out of a rented kitchen in Chikusa, selling loaves to neighbours and a handful of local cafes, before she found the current space and opened Pixel Crown in 2019.