Heart-shaped box (of pizza)

Who needs chocolate - or a fancy dinner out - when Domino's will deliver a heart-shaped pizza right to your door? I'm sure the heart pizza ad will be gone soon, but here's Domino's home page.

Domino's is a bit cheaper than Pizza La, especially if you order online, but doesn't go as all-out with the toppings. They do  e-mail you a link to a jazzy, personalized "real-time" Pizza Tracking Show about what happens at Domino's when your order comes in. The entire gorgeous staff jumps to attention and puts all hands on deck to get your pizza perfectly done and out the door.  It is complete with a fussy fashion queen who frets over the appearance of the toppings. The movie even seamlessly integrates your own name and specific order, and it zeros in on a map of your actual address, which is disconcerting.

Pepperoni and internet stalking - happy Valentine's Day!

Disclaimer: I imagine the box is probably a regular square.

Bonus: More Japandra Valentine's Day treats.

Say it with dried squid covered in chocolate

To show your valentine how you feel.

I found this in the temporary Valentine's chocolate section of Tokyu Hands, but it isn't new. They also have dried squid dipped in caramel, and cheese, and sweet green tea. (Here is a much nicer picture of the いかチョコ from a mostly defunct Japanese site called Junk Food Mania.)
Exactly what feeling does shredded dried squid coated in chocolate convey?
Lower right text: Sweet Dainty

Related posts on the Valentine's Day bunny, Tokyo department store Valentine's madness, and a winged chocolate teddy bear/devil.  

Pick a letter

Oh, I don't know. Just use any one.

Do you believe in the Valentine's Day bunny?

Happy... Valentine's Day.

This chocolate confusion was on the sweets floor on the entrance level of the Daimaru at Tokyo station. The lines of ladies! The longest line was for baumkuchen, but no purveyor of cakes or candies was un-swarmed.

What's not to love?

Yes, Valentine's Day in Japan is grotesquely commercialized beyond Hallmark's wildest dreams. Yes, they've got it all backwards with women giving chocolate to the men they love and know. Yes, it's wrong to force people (there's a reason it's called "obligation chocolate") to go on a spending bender when the world is in recession.

But that is no reason for you to miss out on the one-week-only chocolate wonderlands that spring up in all the department stores, like the Chocolate Promenade at Daimaru, or Joie de Chocolat at Tokyo Midtown. Dozens of swanky international chocolatieres set up rows of glass cases with tasteful displays of chocolates from five bucks and up - way up. Some of the chocolates are whimsical, like flying pigs and teddy bears. Lots of the packaging is intricate and beautiful, with just a few glistening black cubes or manicured red hearts nestled in each custom box. (Don't they know this stuff is for dudes?)
The competition is fierce and the samples are plentiful. Some of these places have extended hours on Friday night. So if you're in Tokyo, you've got about 48 hours left to snag all the dainty little bites of free chocolate you can get your hands on. Free gourmet chocolate? The holiday can't be all bad.

Happy St. Whiteday Day

On Valentine’s day in Japan, department stores have exquisite chocolate exhibitions that put New York’s annual Chocolate Show to shame. But there are no $25 admission tickets or lines around the block - just waves of women in business black nibbling at tiny but plentiful samples as they pick up armloads of beautifully wrapped boxes to give to male co-workers as “obligation chocolate.” There’s also “honmei” chocolate that you give to your “favorite.”
Anyway, the point is that as Hallmark imported bloody St. Valentine, wrapped him in a red ribbon and made us feel guilty about not buying in his name things adorned with either cupids, hearts or thorns, Japan imported Valentine’s day, spun it around backwards and then ran with it straight into the middle of March. There, in the late seventies, a candy company decreed March 14th White Day, a day when dutiful men across the land could return the gifts of obligation and love with marshmallows and white chocolate, and later, more expensive presents. (Why not? If you make up a holiday, you get to make up the rules.)
Which brings us to Brasserie Aux Amis, a French bistro in Tokyo with, perhaps, a chalk-wielding waiter who was dead last in a game of Telephone and ended up advertising their March 14 Chocolate and Flowers prix fixe meal as a celebration of jolly old St. Whiteday.