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The door is inside the shop.

We spend so much time in shopping malls that during last week’s holiday, we decided to take a holiday from the malls as well. First we had lunch at Seryna in Little Tokyo. The food was good, as always, but the usually reliable service failed and Victor’s order (bento) took an hour to arrive. Well, maybe they just hated him. Happy Birthday, Victor!

From our experience, Japanese restaurants tend to have limited dessert options. After they’ve served your wee portions of fresh fruit, what else is there? We racked our brains for non-mall coffee-and-dessert options in Makati. Chocolatier on Jupiter? Happy Cream Puff on Malugay? Purple Oven on Metropolitan Avenue— excellent cakes, but not enough seats for our group.

Juan suggested Bebe Rouge on the corner of Sacred Heart Street and Metropolitan Avenue in San Antonio Village, outside the New Hatchin Japanese grocery. We’d heard of Bebe Rouge, a Japanese-owned French patisserie that makes madeleines, but being a mall creature we hadn’t figured out where it is.

Unlike those self-consciously swanky tea places where the tables are so close together that you’re practically sitting on each other’s laps and you can hear the most private details of strangers’ lives whether you care to or not, Bebe Rouge has lots and lots of room. (Even the gleaming washroom is huge.)

We love Japanese bakeries because the cakes are exquisite and light. Hey, we’re self-indulgent, not suicidal. We had the matcha roll, which was lovely—the green tea taste is not overwhelmed by the sweetness. The word “double” next to “fromage” suggests that when you finish eating it, you’re ready to get shot out into space as a satellite. But Bebe Rouge’s Double Fromage, a two-layered cheesecake with mascarpone cheese mousse, is surprisingly delicate. And the madeleines are dreamy.

The coffee is excellent, the service brisk and unobtrusive. We took home several packages of the anpan—bread with red bean filling. Think of hopiang mongo, but not lardy. Delightful.

The rain was falling like dead bullets when we left the Mind Museum last Saturday. Dr. Cuanang gave a talk about the brain. It started with art; almost everything does.

We had nothing to do and the whole night to do it. Freedom spawns uncertainty, uncertainty summons chaos. We ducked into a restaurant for some hot food. The ramen smell was strong enough to build a garage on.

Cherchez la ramen, Buddy. Remember that. Why are we repeating assorted quotes from hard-boiled detective novels? Because Ricky took these photos at Wrong Ramen and they came out looking like Blade Runner. With a guest appearance by Uncle Junior from The Sopranos.

So write us a story, will ya? A story of 500 words or more, based on these pictures. Could be a detective story, a mystery, a comedy, knock yourselves out. Post them in Comments on or before 4 October 2013.

The prize is a surprise. Of course it’s baffling. You don’t need a private eye if you already know the answer. But it’s something to read, maybe write on. Something good.

The LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

To Saffy it’s a snack dish. To us it’s a handy weapon to have around the house—nice weight, good balance, easy to grasp, made of good old iron. To people with culinary skills, it’s a tiny Mineral B Element iron frying pan by De Buyer, manufacturer of cooking and pastry utensils since 1830. It is has an organic beeswax-based protective finish with no chemicals or coating added, and has natural nonstick properties.

De Buyer, Kuhn Rikon, knIndustrie, Shun, Swiss Diamond, Mori, Barazzoni, Rosle, Spring and other cookware brands that cause gastronomes, epicures, and culinary folk to hyperventilate with lust are now available at KitchenWorks on the lower ground level, East Wing, Shangri-La Mall, Mandaluyong.

KitchenWorks had a media launch last week—what we were doing there we have no idea, we are useless around the kitchen, but those are the most beautiful pots and pans we’ve ever seen.

Illy Espressamente, your coffee is great, but is the tiramisu supposed to rise from the plate in a single solid mass when you stick a fork in it?

Is the mascarpone supposed to have the chewy consistency of bubble gum, or has it merely coagulated from sitting inside a vitrine for several days?

Is your tiramisu an hommage to the chewy Pinoy candy called tira-tira? Or does tira-tira in this case mean “unsold baked goods”?

The waiter said we had to pour the shot of espresso over the tiramisu in order to enjoy it fully. Oh, thank you. As we were sharing the cake with a pregnant woman who was already over-caffeinated, we poured the espresso over our half of the tiramisu. We thought the espresso was supposed to soak into the sponge cake and ladyfingers and give it an intense coffee flavor. Is the espresso really meant to run off the hard surface of the tiramisu and spill onto the plate?

How old is this tiramisu?

How old are the pastries in the vitrine? Is their firm, attractive appearance the result of fossilization?

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Apparently standing in line is part of the ramen experience in Manila: every time we attempt to eat at the new ramen places, we have to wait at least 20 minutes for a table.

After we pronounced Santouka Hokkaido Ramen in Glorietta 4 the best ramen we’ve ever had, we heard that Ikkoryu Ramen Fukuoka at Shangri-La East Wing was better. We’re no expert—we like the ramen at Ukkokei but won’t go out of our way to eat there. And we’re perfectly happy with the tonkotsu ramen at Konbini, the Japanese convenience store in Greenhills. But when we hear “the greatest ramen ever”, we have to go and taste what the fuss is all about.

It was a good time to eat ramen—we’d been stuck in the house for 36 hours in the habagat, living on dry toast and stuff excavated from the back of the fridge. (Having lived alone since our early 20s, with no culinary skills whatsoever, we are in the habit of taking home the leftovers from our meals and storing them. Most of it goes to the outdoor cats, some we eat, the rest turn into biological warfare experiments. Periodically we throw out the stuff before it achieves sentience and takes over the household.) We tried to order out, but every delivery hotline was busy.

When the rains abated we dashed to Ikkoryu at the Shangri-La East Wing, thinking we would be the only diners. How wrong we were. We were seventh in line and had to wait nearly half an hour for a seat.

At Ikkoryu you are given three options for the noodles: soft, normal, or hard. We ordered the exact same dish we had at Santouka, the miso ramen with char siu. As the steaming bowl was placed on the table, we grasped our chopsticks and braced ourselves for what might be a life-changing experience.

Ikkoryu’s miso ramen

Naah. It’s delicious, and whenever we’re in the neighborhood and in the mood for ramen we’ll probably eat there, but we prefer Santouka ramen. As Ricky said, “Santouka is more boungga than Ikkoryu. They deserve the bumi-British na “u” in their name.” Kouraz! Or, we rule in favour of Santouka.

Two days later we discovered that Ikkoryu had opened closer to home, at the basement of Power Plant Mall. This time we asked the wait staff to recommend the ramen flavour, and they said the ajitama was a bestseller.

Ikkoryu’s ajitama ramen

With good reason. We like it better than their miso ramen. But we still prefer the flavour of the broth, the consistency of the noodles, and the evil pork cheeks at Santouka.

Next we’ll try that place in Alabang.

Ooh-la-la, madeleines. Those little shell-shaped buttery cakes that go so well with tea. We found some at Tous les Jours, the Korean bakery, Php36 for a pack of three.

We bit into a madeleine and waited for overwhelming memories of our childhood to kick in. Then we remembered that we never had madeleines in our childhood. A bite of Choc-Nut, guava jelly made by Carmelite nuns, pan de coco or siopao from Ma Mon Luk might transport us back to those times, but not madeleines, which we didn’t taste until we knew how to pronounce the word.

The only childhood we remembered while eating madeleines was Proust’s. Funny how the novels we read become our memories.

Then he goes on about madeleines for the next 300 pages. We exaggerate. But only slightly.

Swann’s Way, the first book in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, turns 100 this year. Penguin has a new translation by Lydia Davis. Available at National Bookstores, Php699.