Restaurant: Two-Michelin star restaurant Narisawa offers classical French cooking using fresh Japanese ingredients. Located in Tokyo’s Minato ward, Narisawa follows its namesake chef’s philosophical theme: “The harmony of sustainability and gastronomy.” Chef Narisawa believes that “Guests should fall under the spell of the season,” consuming only freshly grown seasonal ingredients cooked to perfection. For six years in a row, Restaurant Magazine has listed Narisawa on their World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. In 2014, they listed Narisawa as 14th out of 50; in 2013, they named Narisawa for their inaugural Sustainable Restaurant Award.
Chef: Yoshihiro Narisawa was born in Aichi prefecture in 1969 to a baker and a maker of western-style sweets. As a teenager, Narisawa travelled to Europe and worked in France, Switzerland, and Italy. After eight years of training with European chefs, Narisawa returned to Japan in 1996 and opened his first restaurant La Napoule. In 2003, the chef moved to Tokyo and re-opened the restaurant, naming it Les Créations de Narisawa. Finally, in 2011, he renamed it Narisawa. He promotes organic and natural ingredients as a part of French and Japanese cuisine. “It’s the role of the chef to support (organic) producers,” he says.
Butter: Narisawa’s bread and butter presentation is amazing. The butter looks like a stone covered in moss. The Narisawa staff form chilled butter into stone shapes. Meanwhile, they pour boiling water over olives, dry them in the oven, puree the dried olives, strain them through cheesecloth and apply a layer of the olive paste over the butter. Next they blend spinach and water, strain the mixture, then heat it to drive off the liquid. They spray the fine green mist onto the olive-covered butter and decorate it with seasonal edible herbs. The butter arrives on your plate looking like a mossy stone. When you cut into the “stone,” you find the fresh and flavorful butter. The butter comes served with an equally amazing forest bread. The video below shows how the Narisawa staff creates their forest bread.
Narisawa
107-0061 2-6-15 Minami Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan
el +81-3-5785-0799
