Gentle Monster Opens Nudake Café in Shanghai, Hangzhou Flagship

SHANGHAI — Gentle Monster, known best as the Korean eyewear retailer with funky boutiques, has expanded with a Nudake café in Shanghai and a shop in Hangzhou.

Opened this month, the Nudake dessert café in Shanghai is the second in China, following the location in Beijing’s SKP-S mall. Quite a bit larger than the Nudake Beijing location, the Shanghai café theme is the theater meets an oyster bar. It’s located on the third floor of the Gentle Monster Shanghai boutique on Huaihai Road.

As one would expect from the highly creative brand, the Nudake café serves up desserts in imaginative and unexpected shapes — for instance, cakes shaped like a sardine can, a lobster, or parts of a face like an ear or a nose.

Meanwhile in Hangzhou, the brand has opened its first boutique for Zhejiang province playing with the concept of memories. A figure of an elderly lady seemingly in deep contemplation greets visitors to the store and further installations inside, such as of a donkey represent the elderly lady’s childhood memories.

This latest boutique opening brings Gentle Monster’s total shop locations in China to eight.

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