Sakurado began with a memory and a missing flavour.
In 1993, Mei left China for Japan to study the language. She stayed for five years. She studied, worked, and met her husband. She lived next door to a bakery, and stepped out to the smell of fresh Japanese bread every morning. She fell in love with a country that took dessert as seriously as her grandfather had taken bread. He had run a bakery in China when she was a child, and Mei had grown up among flour, sugar, and the quiet rhythm of a working kitchen. Japan didn’t teach her to love sweets. That was already in her. It taught her how they could be made.
What she found there changed how she thought about dessert. Japanese sweets are never too sweet. They’re balanced and considered, leaving space for the ingredients to speak. When she returned to the UK, every cake felt sugar-heavy, every dessert too rich. The balance she had come to love simply wasn’t here.
So she made it.
Mei founded Sakurado in 2017, beginning quietly out of the back of a fish and chip shop in Putney. She opened the first Sakurado café in Kensington soon after. The business has since grown to five cafés across London, and a kitchen full of people who share Mei’s love of careful, balanced craft.
The name Sakurado means “house of the cherry blossoms.” It is a nod to the Tokyo neighbourhood where Mei lived, where sakura trees lined the river by her home. Hanami, the Japanese tradition of gathering to honour the brief bloom, sits at the heart of the brand.
Sakurado is built on a single quiet belief: the best desserts are balanced, considered, and never overwhelming.
