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Antique Bakery, Vol. 1 | 
| Author: Fumi Yoshinaga
Publisher: Digital Manga Publishing
List Price: $12.95
Buy New: $3.90
You Save: $9.05 (70%)
Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 353774
Media: Paperback
Pages: 200
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 6 x 0.7
ISBN: 1569709467
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.5952
EAN: 9781569709467
ASIN: 1569709467
Publication Date: August 17, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Good Condition, Dispatched from UK, delivery time 10 to 12 Working days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Ono has come a long way since the agonizing day in high school when he confessed his love to handsome Tachibana. Now, some 14 years later Ono, a world-class pastry chef and outed playboy has it all. No man can resist Ono's charms (or his cooking skills!) but he has just found a new position under a man named Tachibana. Can this be the only man who resisted his charms, and if so, will the man who once snubbed the "magically gay" Ono get his just desserts? And how in the heck did a former middleweight boxing champion wind up as Ono's cake boy? Digital Manga happily serves up the opening volume of Antique Bakery.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
 Cute and Quirky February 12, 2008
Fringe (LA County)
What a fun title! I bought this on a whim, and I certainly don't regret it. Yoshinaga has written a refreshing, enjoyable manga.
The premise is simple: three guys run a small bakery, each one of them as quirky as the next. Throughout the book we get to see glimpses of their lives as well as some cute stories about their customers. While not too deep, there's enough back story and character development to keep the plot chugging along.
All in all, if you want a manga that'll make you feel sweet, this one's it.
Too good! November 5, 2007
Shad Shadow
I want to eat the food in this manga! The art is so good that the artist rendition of the food makes me want to try it all! This is not really yaoi and in fact has little to do with sexuality. This is about (really 4, but 3 at first) a group of guys running a bakery. One is a former boxer (good with women, but doesn't seem or brag like he is), one is a gay pastry chef (who no man, except the boss, can resist even if they are straight), one is the boss (comes from a wealthy family, but has had a traumatic experience and never shows it), and another is a childhood friend of the boss (not a bright fellow, but hot and sweet). Buy this...it is very good!
Nice story May 12, 2007
Snuggles D. Rabbit (New Mexico)
I am enjoying this series a lot. It has a fun story line, interesting characters and nice art work.
Light on the yaoi elements, one character is gay, and his gayness is a running gag throughout -- he is uber gay, no man can refuse his charms. The real charm is the interaction between the bakery staff and the backstories of their customers.
No heavy, graphic sex scene here.
 Full Series Review. December 8, 2006
Karnation (Queens, NY USA)
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
In the following, I succeeded in being non-spoilery with the main story, which is the best part. But there are still some spoilers for Volumes 2 and 3.
ANTIQUE BAKERY is about a pastry shop run by three good looking but messed up guys. They and the various customers who come in and out of their lives SEEM to have little in common, though of course we suspect otherwise. When the story comes together (which it starts to do in Book 2), what is produced is a first rate mystery/psychological study. The main story line built around the central character is really extremely moving and well done.
However, when I was finished with this series, I found I disliked it as a whole. My reasons?
1) I didn't LIKE a single character other than the one who turns out to be the main character.
2) Most of the vignettes which don't factor into the main story are either depressing or boring or both. There are a few that manage poignant or funny. But most of them (the D-Cups) are just a crashing waste of time. And all of them seem to come across as rather more misanthropic or downbeat than they need to.
3) The way the character of Ono the pastry-chef was handled left a bad taste in my mouth. He's the cliche "wolf" whose unethical sexual behavior is supposed to be a forgivable (or funny) as long as it is confined to strangers, but who turns all soft-hearted restraint when confronted with a character the reader LIKES, which always strikes me as a hypocritical copout. Similarly, another major character we are expected to like admits to having committed "every crime short of murder", and we are apparently supposed to just take this in stride and move on to the next wacky customer.
4) But the REAL problem was the French Chef story in Book 3. While the subject matter could not have been anything other than sad and horrifying, and rightly so, the author's manner of presenting it struck me as sadistic, exploitative, and hypocritical. I felt, at one point, as though I had slipped into an entirely different sort of comic. This ultimately affected the entire manga -- invalidating the tale's ostensible humanism, and making it depressing in entirely the wrong way.
A lot of good things have been said about this series, and I don't disagree with most of them. It's droll, witty, suspenseful, and well characterized. The craft and research that went into it are impressive. The author clearly takes her work as seriously as her genius pastry-chef does. It won an award, and it got made into TV series, so obviously a lot of people like it. _I_ liked it - or wanted to. But for the reasons above I found it left a very bad aftertaste. I don't want to make space for it on my shelf, and feel rather inclined to avoid the writer in future than not. On the other hand, I would gladly try the TV series if I had the chance. I think this same story told with a more truly humanistic sensibility, and without the moments of gratuitous authorial sadism and demeaning and dangerous homosexual cliche, would be a very good thing. As it stands, it is -- for me -- not quite worth it.
Something this yummy isn't a gamble March 9, 2006
Pg-chan (the breadbasket, USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Like others, I was surprised to see this so widely labeled as yaoi, but at the same time I can understand it. Publishers are under pressure to label things clearly so nobody will be accidently surprised by "mature" content, and this series does loosely sit in several different genres. The stories here are probably best classifed as slice-of-life - sometimes a bit silly, but reflecting with a more mature attitude towards life's choices. For those looking for guy on guy action, probably this will be a disapointment; the only real reason that it's listed yaoi is that one of the main characters is so openly and unabashedly gay. Nothing too titillating here.
Except, of course, the cakes.
That's another genre this series touches on - the concept series. A good half of the focus lies with the confections the bakery produces, and the process of making them. Several of the stories also have an underlying theme of the love of sweets. Honestly, I was going to give this 3 stars. The pace is so sedated that it makes the story relaxed, but at the same time you only really can say you see the story moving if you look at the series as a whole. The individual volumes are pretty relaxing and set on the day-to-day running of the bakery. But the pictures and descriptions of the food here justified bumping it up to 4 stars. You can easily leave one of these feeling hungry.
The sedate pace shouldn't put readers off, because the story actually develops over the 4 volumes. Things that seemed unimportant earlier reappear to be part of a larger picture later. Given time, the backstory brushes much more serious subjects. The story, in a way, builds like a layer cake - each piece is individually light and flavorful, but they go together to make a larger product with more substance. Others have already stated that this is an award winner, but its popularity also inspired a live-action drama called simply "Antique." This series comes highly recommended, and really, at 4 volumes this light and delicious story isn't really a buying gamble.
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